How will it work

NBN Co will provide nationwide wholesale access to broadband through uniform national wholesale access pricing and competitive pricing offerings using a combination of fibre, fixed wireless and satellite technologies.

The new superfast network will give 93% of Australian homes, schools and workplaces access to optical fibre that will enable broadband services to be provided to Australians in urban and regional towns.

We will offer a wholesale-only Layer 2 bitstream product in order to occupy as small a footprint as possible in the overall value chain. This means we will leave retail service providers (RSPs) with significant ability to innovate and develop new services across the higher levels of the value chain. The location of Point of Interconnection (PoIs) is expected to support healthy competition among RSPs and align with contestable backhaul. For more densely populated areas, such as urban and regional centres a “local” Point of Interconnection (PoI) will be established for each Fibre Serving Area (FSA).

NBN Co Fibre Access Service will deliver an active wholesale network connection via one or more Ethernet Virtual Circuits from the NBN Co Point of Interconnect to the premises within the NBN Co Fibre–to-the-Premises footprint. It will also deliver analogue telephony and Ethernet interfaces at the End-User Premises. Service Providers can interconnect at designated NBN Co Points of Interconnect which serve defined fibre Connectivity Serving Areas. One Point of Interconnect will service one or more Connectivity Serving Areas. The initial offering will be an Ethernet Bitstream product. It will consist of four key product components – two physical and two logical network bandwidth elements. Service Providers can build service offerings with significant flexibility using this component approach. For more information on the four components please see our product components.

NBN Co also plans to provide point to point solutions that will assist retail service providers to deliver solutions for the business market.

Our wholesale products will support access by multiple RSPs, a range of customer premises equipment (CPE) and is expected to include an interface for analogue telephony within the fibre footprint. The detail of how these elements will be presented to our wholesale partners will be discussed in consultation papers.