[LINK] Fibre-to-the-premises government consultation paper

[Tom Worthington]

The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy 
issued a "National Broadband Network: Fibre-to-the-premises in 
greenfield estates Consultation paper" 29 May 2009: 
<http://www.dbcde.gov.au/communications/national_broadband_network/fibre_in_greenfield_estates_and_fibre_roll-out>.

The paper is available as a 23 page, 482 Kbyte PDF document. 
Submissions on the paper can be made until 12 June 2009.

One point the paper makes is that battery backup will need to be 
provided for the equipment on the customer premises. The paper 
suggests that maintenance for this is likely to be the consumer's 
responsibility by analogy with fire alarms and smoke detectors. 
However, there are many documented cases of deaths due to not 
correctly maintained fire alarms and smoke detectors. It may not be 
good public policy to apply this to the NBN knowing that the system 
is then likely to fail in an emergency, such as a bushfire.

Unfortunately the Department has made the paper difficult to find and 
obtain by placing it behind a registration process which requires the 
reader to enter their name, email address and organisation name. 
There appears to be no good reason for this process, which appears to 
be contrary to government policy for access to information. To make 
the paper easier to find, I have blogged an extract, minus diagrams 
and some administrative details of the consultation process at: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2009/05/fibre-to-premises-in-greenfield-estates.html>



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University