Organisations should prepare for the NBN now: Gartner

Enterprise network users must evaluate their attitudes, relationships and approaches to sourcing networking services in Australia, because of the radical NBN-fuelled changes emerging in the telecommunications environment.

According to Gartner research VP Geoff Johnson, with frequent and multiple commercial and technical developments within the NBN Co and service providers likely to occur during 2010, businesses will have to promptly absorb and act on these developments from a planning perspective.

In a research paper on the issue, Johnson wrote that enterprise network service buyers stood to benefit from these developments through extra competition from a structurally separated Telstra, plus all carriers having equitable commercial access to the fastest network will enable buyers to bid more competitively.

New complete distribution networks to 100 per cent of the population would also enable all retail carriers to use the NBN wholesale infrastructure, and new business models which capitalised on complete coverage and ultra-high-speed broadband were likely to emerge in the health, education, energy and transport sectors.

“Given that the largest and smallest businesses will have access to this radical new infrastructure, each business has a responsibility to create its own sustainable advantage,” he wrote.

To address the issue, Johnson advises that enterprises should be prepared to invest management time to assess their supply arrangements may change, and pursue opportunities to sustainably improve their organization's basic business operations using the emerging FTTP NBN.

Enterprises should also reassess their network architectures in light of the emerging fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) passive optical network (PON), which may provide higher speed, widely distributed network alternatives from a broad choice of retail network service providers.

“Businesses must take an interest in… the way that legislation is passed and implemented prior to mid-2010, how Telstra's separation is negotiated, which PON architectures are chosen for FTTP deployment, and what interfaces NBN Co chooses for [retail network service providers],” Johnson wrote.

“Enterprises must factor in the effects of each of these steps on their national networking plans. The national rollout (which has already begun in Tasmania) is likely to be at least 20% complete nationally by 2012, and at least 50% complete by 2015.”

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