Product roadmap

NBN Co will launch new products and additional features over time in a series of product releases. Our product releases are generally focused on delivering capabilities and functionality that are expected to be available to downstream our service providers’ end users. Even though NBN Co is a wholesale provider, we take this approach to deliver a cohesive set of features and capabilities available to our service providers to build services to their customers. Within the limitations of the underlying technology, service providers can select features from different releases to build a retail offering.

A high-level overview of the major product and feature releases:

Broadband and telephony: This release of the foundational fibre offering has given our service providers the opportunity to build their core broadband and telephony products for the National Broadband Network. The release included up to five access speed tiers for end user services*. This release included NBN Co’s best-efforts traffic class; Traffic Class 4 as well as NBN Co’s traffic class designed to support telephony, Traffic Class 1.

• High speed broadband
• High quality Voice over Internet Protocol telephony
• Broadband and telephony bundles
• Facilitate migration of plain old telephony services to NBN telephony services (Fibre Only)

Multicast: This planned release will see the introduction of the multicast feature become available on the fibre access network. Multicast will allow service providers to inject a piece of data once into an NBN Co Point-of-Interconnect, and have that data replicated out to thousands of end user premises. This makes the technology ideal for internet television providers - who can inject their channel line-up once at a Point-of-Interconnect, and have those channels replicated and transmitted to thousands of end users.

• Scalable internet television
• Triple play bundles; telephony, data and video
• e-learning and health applications
• Software as a service applications

Business services and service enhancements: These planned releases are designed to support business end users with high speed broadband and multi-line telephony capability. It will also provide service and operational enhancements to our service providers.

• E-learning and health applications
• Small business broadband, telephony bundles
• Video conferencing, video collaboration services
• Multi-line telephony/small Private Automatic Branch Exchange (PABX)
• Enhanced service levels and customer reporting

Medium business services: This planned release will comprise features intended to support medium sized businesses. It will include additional traffic classes designed to support video conferencing and collaboration, data networking and additional enhanced service level options.

• Video conferencing, video collaboration services
• Virtual Private Networks (VPN)
• e-learning and health applications
• Enhanced service levels

Enterprise Ethernet Service: This planned release will enable our service providers to serve the mission critical sites of large enterprise customers (for example, hospitals and banks). This release will include very high bandwidth options, transparency features and access redundancy.

• Very high capacity links
• Virtual Private Networks (VPN)
• High availability services

*NBN Co is designing the NBN to be capable of delivering these speeds to NBN Co’s wholesale customers (Service Providers) via fibre, fixed wireless and satellite. Speeds actually achieved by retail customers (End Users) will depend on a number of factors including the quality of their equipment and in-Premises connection, the broadband plans offered by their Service Provider and how their Service Provider designs its network to cater for multiple End Users.