[LINK] NBN network surveillance centre

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

NBN Co to open 24x7 network surveillance centre

Houses "specialist tiger" tactical response unit.

By Ry Crozier on Feb 7, 2011 <www.itnews.com.au/News/247116,nbn-co-to-
open-24x7-network-surveillance-centre.aspx>


NBN Co plans to open a round-the-clock network surveillance operations 
centre, in Melbourne at the end of April, that will house three tiers of 
network support including a specialist tactical response unit.

Staff will unofficially start moving into the NSOC at Melbourne Docklands 
as early as next month after a facility build time of less than a year.

Docklands is also home to NBN Co's network operations centre and national 
test facility.

The NSOC will be supported by back-up centres being constructed 
in "another part of Melbourne and in a part of the greater Sydney 
metropolitan area" that will spring into action if Docklands suffers an 
outage or is evacuated, according to NBN Co's network and service 
operations general manager Kevin Saunders.

Most staff in the NSOC will be attached to a Tier 1 (first-level) 
customer operations team or a network surveillance and control team, 
although some technicians will also make up a specialist Tier 3 unit.

"All the access seeker inquiries and concerns, whether via B2B 
[interfaces], email or phone, will come in through that [Tier 1 customer 
operations] funnel," Saunders said.

"They're a service desk that is skilled up to address about 97 percent of 
all faults."

Saunders said the network surveillance and control team, meanwhile, would 
monitor "every alarm and notification that comes up out of the network."

He said that alarm rules would be built into NBN Co's operations support 
systems (OSS) and that systems would be "as automated as possible" to cut 
down the time taken to conduct a root-cause analysis of any issues 
occurring in the network.

The team would also be tasked with managing and accepting changes or 
bringing new parts of the network into operation.

The third team to be housed in the NSOC is network support – made up of 
Tier 3 "subject matter experts" on the NBN.

Part of their role is the integration of "disparate parts of the network" 
before those pieces can be accepted into general operation.

Within network support will also live the "specialist tiger team" – a 
crack unit of NBN Co operations workers and engineers, and vendor 
representatives from Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia-Siemens Networks where they 
are required.

The tiger team will be tasked with resolving cross-boundary and other 
interconnection issues that impact the quality of internet services 
experienced by an end user. 

These could feasibly be caused by bottlenecks outside of the immediate 
NBN network - such as on retail service providers or other access 
seekers' networks.

"The carriers' bane is they don't want to reject a fault – they want to 
resolve a fault, but they can only do that for faults inside their 
network," NBN Co's head of network operations Steve Christian told iTnews.

Christian said that factors outside the boundary of the NBN – for 
example, the contention ratio used by an access seeker or RSP – could be 
behind customer reports that their "network is slow".

"You have to have the tools, test equipment and processes in place to 
identify that," he said.

The tiger team will also be tasked with "assisting access seekers with 
products", according to Saunders.

"We've already come across this in Tasmania where we had all the access 
seekers around a table trying to work out the best way to service a 
customer," Saunders said.  Copyright © iTnews.com.au

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Cheers,
Stephen