Phone and internet service providers selling National Broadband Network (NBN) services have nine months to transfer their services to the network’s established Points of Interconnect (POIs), as NBN Co prepares to decommission its temporary POIs.
NBN Co, the company behind the rollout of the NBN, said on 9 May that the entirety of the network has now been directed away from temporary POIs, which were originally set up in 2011 to allow phone and internet providers to interconnect with the network during the initial stages of its construction, to established POIs.
According to NBN Co employee communications executive content producer Greg Thom the network builder has been working with the industry since 2014 to commence the migration of services from the original temporary POIs to the new established ones.
“The first network migrations commenced in late 2015 with phone and internet providers beginning to transfer services to the established POIs soon after,” Thom said in a blog post.
“Phone and internet providers now have nine months to finalise the transfer of their services to the established POIs, with NBN Co committing to the decommissioning of temporary POIs by the end of 2018,” he said.
It is understood that about 210,000 services covering 108 POIs across Australia were provisioned through the temporary POIs, with approximately 65,000 yet to be transferred.
The NBN is built on 121 established POIs across the country, providing access to individual Customer Serving Areas (CSAs).
However, the original raft of temporary POIs was located in NBN Co’s five ‘First Release’ sites, fixed wireless and greenfield sites that were built before its established POIs were available in the area.
Temporary POIs were also established in five of Australia’s major capital cities as part of the initial delivery of services over the NBN, giving phone and internet providers that were trialling services over the network easy connection as well as making the network operational.
The temporary POIs were subsequently used to provide access to NBN services at greenfield and wireless sites where transit infrastructure and established POIs were not yet available.
Now, as established POIs are commissioned, they will serve all premises that are connected to the NBN within their associated CSAs.
“As part of the commissioning process, phone and internet providers are required to deliver their own ‘backhaul’ (existing phone and internet provider networks) to each established POI before being able to order products from NBN Co and, in turn, offer their own services to end users,” Thom said in the post.
“Consistent with NBN Co’s obligations under the Special Access Undertaking (SAU) and Wholesale Broadband Agreement, NBN Co will migrate services from the temporary to established POIs on an individual CSA basis,” he said.
