Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2011/10/06/primus_dwdm_in_oz/
Primus deploying capital city DWDM
Junior telco plots Oz fibre upgrade
Posted in Networks, 6th October 2011 23:04 GMT
Primus Australia has announced the start of a rollout that it hopes will eventually reach five Australian mainland capital cities.
The company says it has already upgraded its business fibre networks in Sydney and Melbourne with OTN/DWDM endpoints, based on Huawei OSN 8800 kit, and hopes to add its Brisbane, Adelaide and networks in the future.
The upgrade replaces the company’s existing Sonet/SDH-based network with one that’s more suitable for expansion using DWDM, the company says, and is more flexible in terms of the range of supported customer speeds. Sonet/SDH services will still be offered in the range of customer connections, along with Ethernet and “low-latency Ethernet” services.
This flexibility means the carrier will be able to craft fibre-based services suitable for smaller businesses.
The capital city focus puts the upgraded network within reach of Australia’s exploding data centre market, driven by our reportedly-strong adoption of cloud computing and rapidly-growing Internet downloads.
However, the company also flagged, in conversation with telco industry subscriber-only newsletter Communications Day, that it is also considering possible regional locations, perhaps with a view to entering a backhaul and interconnect market that Australia’s National Broadband Network will create.
The NBN is to be a customer access network only, in essence creating islands of customer fibre, with retail service providers responsible for securing backhaul connections from the 121 planned Points of Interconnect (POIs) back into their own networks.
While that model has come under criticism on the basis of complexity and cost, it’s also seen as an opportunity by carriers – which apart from Telstra include Optus, AAPT, Nextgen Networks and others – who have suitable wholesale-level fibre networks in place. ®