[AusNOG] NBN Co Petition

[Matthew Moyle-Croft]

I think it's not "14 POIs" vs "100+ POIs".  It's finding the right
middle ground:

Creating 14 POIs to do 10M+ services is dumb.  But building a model
where less than 100k services are available at each and some have very
high costs to reach is dumb as well.  Especially considering how small
Australia is as a market and how concentrated the ownership of
customers is.

NBNCo is/was/may still be building a "transit" (their word) network
between all FAN sites to connect them all for management.  The cost to
extend the remote POIs to more central ones is really just the cost of
DWDM transponder cards.  (My understanding is it's in the order of 10s
of millions).

If we built a model to allow people to connect where they wanted it
might work - allow NBNCo to charge higher aggregation fees for those
who aggregate to a central POI, then fine.  But that makes NBNCo run a
much more complex network.  Maybe do it at "cost" which'll drive down
equivalent wholesale costs for people to offer their own aggregation.
ie. no one is going to charge more.

The current model is dumb because it does allow a very small number of
players (Telstra, Optus, Nextgen), some of whom have conflicting
interests in the retail space, to control access to the remote POIs
(non-metro) and reinvent the games played with wholesale costs for
transmission played with places like Tas, Darwin, etc.

My point being that there's no perfect model.  But little work has
been done to provide a better transition to the NBN (in whatever form)
nor ensure that current market dominance isn't reenforced unfairly due
to circumstances that arose previously.  (See my argument for buying
back Telstra from earlier).

(I didn't even get into the whole "last mile residential is a SPOF
anyway so why worry so hard, but that's a can of worms too hard to
keep shut once opened).

MMC