Tasmania: Australia’s FttH testbed.
It is great to see that Tasmania is going to take the lead in the national rollout of the FttH network.
Over the years I have been critical of the various aborted plans of the Tasmanian state government but in the end, with the blessing of the Federal Government’s appointed Expert Group, it has outshone the rest of the country and is being allowed to take the lead.
Tassie will be not just in the national but also in the international spotlight, and at the same time, as a more or less contained market, it will constitute an excellent test case for the rest of the country.
Over the years BuddeComm has been very supportive of the activities of Aurora Energy and TasCOLT. Aurora first showed its FttH vision in 2005 when it proposed such a rollout in conjunction with the state government’s plans to reticulate gas over the island. The company also showed world leadership with its broadband over powerlines pilot.
FttH history in Tasmania
During 2001 the State Governments of Tasmania and Victoria supported CEOS http://www.ceos.com.au/ and the Tasmanian Electronics Commerce Centre (TECC) http://www.tecc.com.au for the first incarnation of the COLT FTTH project with a submission to Department of Communications’ advanced networks program. This submission however, was not successful but in 2002 the State Government of Victoria funded COLT through the STI initiative, the first FTTH testbed in Australia which is still operating in Ballarat.
In 2002 the State Government of Tasmania contracted the deployment of a 420 km optic-fibre backbone connecting North, North West and Southern Tasmania, in conjunction with the high-pressure transmission gas trench. Thereafter in 2005 the State Government funded tasCOLT, the first commercial “brownfield” FTTH project in Australia. tasCOLT was proposed by CEOS and the TECC and had foundation members including Aurora, TasTel, Hitachi, Intel, Corning and other international leaders and continues to operate as a commercial FTTH network.
The groundbreaking work that CEOS and TasCOLT have done in FttH R&D, both on the mainland and in Tasmania itself positions them amongst the global leaders.
Critics will point out that these projects never reached their full potential and most were abandoned, and that certainly has been my criticism also, since 2006. But nevertheless the companies involved have certainly shown that they are prepared to take the initiative. They have a passion to do something positive for the local community; these are very admirable attributes of these organisations and very important ingredients to work through what will undoubtedly be tough times ahead when the network is rolled out.
This time, however, we are no longer talking about R&D and pilot projects. This time it’s for real and we can’t stress enough how important it is to set up a highly qualified international team of leaders who can make this happen. We simply don’t have sufficient expertise in Australia, let alone Tasmania, to make it happen.
Our major concern is that the magnitude of this project should not be underestimated. I am not talking here just about Tasmania – the scale of the challenge would be daunting even for Australia as a whole.
There will be technical, financial and regulatory challenges, but these pale in comparison to the personnel challenge we will face if we don’t get a team in place that can manage this project, with the capacity and the vision to operate in a trans-sector mode (across telecoms, energy, healthcare, education, media).
I sincerely hope that we won’t adopt a parochial attitude – we need to get the best people in the world involved.
The good thing is that the Tasmanian team can concentrate on the deployment plan with less need to worry about the national challenges the NBC faces, and this will take a significant slice off the activities of the Tasmanian structure, such as the overall financial structure and the regulatory structure. While these are of course also relevant to Tasmania they are of greater consequence on the national level.
In this trans-sector project we also have a national responsibility and an obligation to look, not just at connectivity, but also at sustainability. We need to build smart connected and sustainable communities. The fact that Aurora is involved will allow us to look at smart grids. We need to multiply the FttH benefits and while there are many other sectors that must be included in the project, smart grid is a natural fit for Tassie because of Aurora’s involvement.
There are some good examples of similar FttH/smart grid projects in Switzerland and Canada (Ottawa). It is essential that we use this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to look at how this FttH grid can also operate to link in with distributed energy systems, especially in relation to wind and solar energy generated by individual people. The network can also be used to facilitate the management of the infrastructure needed for e-cars.
It would be a missed opportunity if the Department of Climate Change did not look at the green commerce project in Ottawa to see how we can implement this in Tasmania, with the assistance of Aurora.
If we plan the infrastructure with these opportunities in mind it will involve very little extra expenditure, but if we try to do it later it will be at significant additional cost. At a minimum these kinds of activities need to be included in the planning so that they can easily be followed up at a later.
Paul Budde
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April 16th, 2009 at 6:13 am
I agree that there are some great people in Tasmania on the FTTH front, it is a pity that companies like Aurora did disband some of their teams not that long ago – but the majority of the people are still about.
What worries me is that the desire for a quick-win in the political sense might work against those attributes of a trans-sectorial network that would need to be put in place at the foundational level.
We must keep everyone focused on the long term outcome and vision and not take any short cuts along the way; be they technical, architectural, organisational, financial or regulatory in nature.
April 16th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
With Aurora, TasTel, Hitachi, Intel and Corning members still around, albeit disbanded, we have a good opportunity to ultilise their experience within Tasmania and use it as a starting point. As we know that funding was an impediment in the earlier endeavours, it does not seem to be now.
With that background, if we put all the resources to use sincerely and not use it to score cheap political points, this project is bound to fly.
As with all new technologies and implementation of prototype systems, finding expertise to carry out such large scale projects would indeed be of paramount importance. This is a major worry as trans-sectoral expertise is a rare commodity in this day and age.
April 16th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
I have thought a little bit more about the Tassie situation. Initially I thought as you saw in the blog lets’ give Tassie another chance. However, as Tassie will be in the spotlight and the credibility of the overall project will be on the line I decided to also give a more critical assessment of the situation here.
As an observer and analysis I have been involved with telco developments in Tassie since 2003 when they started to look at reticulating gas and wanted to put fibre in. Aurora developed a plan for the State Govt. all was set to go and than on Christmas Eve the Tas. Govt pulled the plug (we still don’t know why). They put the gas pipes in but failed to use the opportunity to lay fibre in that same trench.
Before that we had the fibre plan in Launceston and around this time also something similar in Burnie. So far the teams involved in these projects has failed to deliver. I won’t even mention the stranded Downer fibre cable right through the island from north to south.
Aurora started with BPL spend two years on the project but in the end (after a year of endless deliberations) the Board decided it was too risky and that they now didn’t want to be involved in the last mile.
There are only a few people in Tassie that know what this is all about: Len Zivol, Piero Peroni and Bob Darwin. None of them are currently involved in the project. It would be a missed opportunity to not use the expertise and the knowledge of these three people, together they know more about a Tassie FttH roll out – including the trans sector approach (smart grid) – than anybody else.
It will be essential for the success of the project to establish a project team of international and national experts. We need fresh blood in the project and only the best will do.
Obviously things need to change very dramatic and very rapidly in order for this project to have any chance of success. Based on previous experiences the odds are against Tassie to deliver on this project. However, we simply can not afford a failure under no circumstances whatsoever.