As the NBN endeavours to roll out wholesale broadband across Australia, the company's operations and results have remained consistently divisive in the public eye. In an effort to sift the common misconceptions with the facts, we decided to go directly to the source, and reached out for a chat with the Executive Manager at NBN Co, Tony Brown. 


What are the biggest challenges you're facing with the NBN? 

The scale of the rollout remains a huge challenge for nbn, at present we are going through a quieter time in terms of activations compared to the second half of last year - but we are still activating 25,000 premises per week! Once we started HFC premises Ready to Connect at the rate of 100,000 per month from July onwards then we are going to see our activation rate return back to the kind of 50,000 premises per week levels we saw frequently last year.

When you are connecting 50,000 premises per week you are effectively connecting a city the size of Canberra every three weeks - that's a lot of connections. 

What are the public perception challenges you're facing with the NBN? Do you think the NBN is getting a bad rap, and if so, why? Is it a misconception? 

Nbn is one of the only infrastructure projects in the history of Australia that will ultimately affect almost every single premises in the country one way or another. What's more, nbn is supplying a commodity in the shape of broadband that people use every single day - and many people use it every second they are not asleep. That being the case, nbn has an impact on Australians far broader than anything else we have ever seen before and is under understandable close scrutiny from a range of quarters. The biggest misconception about nbn is that we actually sell and deliver broadband services to end-users - the reality is that we do not. Nbn is a wholesale-only operator and we only sell services to phone or internet retailers who then in turn sell and deliver services to end-users. The face of the matter is that nbn is only responsible for the quality of a broadband connection someone is receiving up a point - the vast majority of the responsibility for service quality lies with the retailers themselves. 

What many people fail to realise is that you can have two service providers deliver services over the same piece of the nbn network and the quality of service from one to the other can range from amazing to awful - it all depends on how they set up their network and how much capacity they have invested in. 

There are people out there on very expensive Fibre-to-the-Premises connections getting ADSL like speeds because their service provider is not doing a great job whilst others will be getting a solid 100Mbps on Fibre-to-the-Node because their provider has put enough capacity into the pipe and set up their network properly. 


What's a CVC and how does it effect my speed? 

A CVC is a Connectivity Virtual Circuit (CVC) - this is how phone and internet providers purchase capacity for end-users on the nbn access network. In short, the more CVC that an internet provider allocate to each end-user then the better the quality of service will be for the end user. However, retailers choose to allocate their purchased capacity very differently for their end-users, some allocate a lot of capacity for end-users whilst others allocate a significant amount less. 

The difference will typically be seen in the prices people pay for their service, retailers that are allocating a substantial amount of CVC will likely have to charge end-users more for their service than those who are allocating only a small amount of CVC for each end-user. If a deal sounds too good to be true then it probably is, end-users really need to shop around to make sure they select the right provider for them and they sign up for the right plan. 

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