KEY POINTS:
I've been watching with great interest the cable-laying activity in the streets of inner-city Auckland. It's been all go: great holes in the ground, pipe-thrusting machines grunting away and concrete bases being poured to support the housings for new equipment.
Is this Vector doing something about the unsightly power wires that clutter the skyline? No, although that would be nice. This is Telecom's - or Chorus', since the creation of the separate network company - cabinetisation project, extending optical fibre closer to where we live.
As of the middle of October, about 150 of an intended 3600 cabinets had gone live. It's not just in the heart of Auckland that they're appearing - people in Invercargill, Palmerston North, Wellington, Upper Hutt, Napier and Greymouth should be noticing the green 1.5m-long by 1.3m-high shelters on footpaths.
From the cabinets, the newly laid optical fibre runs off to the nearest telephone exchange. What we know as cabinetisation, the rest of the world calls fibre to the node (FTTN), the next best thing to fibre to the home (FTTH).
Priority for cabinet installation is being given to locations furthest from exchanges, where Telecom's DSL-based broadband service performs poorly or doesn't reach at all.
For those with a cabinet in their neighbourhood, ADSL2+ broadband at close to the theoretical maximum speed of 24Mbit/s should be on offer.
And not just from Telecom. When Telecom first announced the cabinetisation plan a year ago, internet service providers cried foul. It came hot on the heels of local loop unbundling (LLU), the hard-fought right ISPs were granted by the Government to put their own equipment in Telecom exchanges.
Cabinetisation, ISPs said, could undermine the value of unbundling, because exchanges would be obsolete. But that's not the way it appears to be working out.
Exchanges will continue to service the subscribers near to them, while those more than a couple of kilometres away will be connected to the closest street cabinet. And from this month, a "sub-loop unbundling" agreement is expected to be in place that will allow ISPs to put their gear in cabinets.
This leap forward in deployment of broadband comes about through both regulatory and technology revolutions. The equipment that is going into Chorus' cabinets is a fraction of the size of the equivalent old exchange technology.
Nokia Siemens Networks is a maker of such gear and Martin Lust, the company's Munich-based head of broadband access technology, was in the country in late September to visit Orcon, his sole New Zealand customer (others are welcome to sign up, he says).
When Telecom revealed the cabinetisation plan, Orcon boss Scott Bartlett feared it could signal a return to the pre-LLU "dark days", but that's not the way Lust sees it.
"I'm not sure if going to FTTN is necessarily a tactic to find a detour around regulation. It can be driven by a desire to provide other services to your customer, which it is fair enough to do.
"I wouldn't see it as a threat against local loop unbundling because there are also ways you can deregulate services in a cabinet or in an FTTN scenario which also give competitors opportunities."
Nokia Siemens is putting its R&D effort into pizza-box size devices, mini DSLAMs, that can be accommodated by the cabinets. They are capable of providing ADSL2+ and the still faster (about 50Mbit/s) VDSL2 services.
Fibre all the way to the home might be the ideal, but Lust says it's not yet economic. "The best way currently I think is to go with a VDSL solution. From a shelter [cabinet] you can go 50 to 100Mb/s, depending on loop length, and that's basically sufficient for all the applications we see."
Television delivered down the phone line - or IPTV - is the kind of application that could take advantage of VDSL2 speeds, Lust says.
The faster DSL services go, the more power they take, and the greater the likelihood of interference - or crosstalk - between adjacent phone lines. Lust says developments like dynamic spectrum management can solve that problem and eke more speed out of copper lines.
Once terms have been agreed, ISPs will have a couple of options for offering services from the cabinets. They can resell a Telecom wholesale service or install their own mini DSLAMs. If they don't want to do either, yet they have customers whose lines have been moved by Chorus from an exchange to a cabinet, they will have to give up the customer. If that's their best choice, it really would be a return to the dark days.
Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist
BUSINESS HERALD / IDC TECH POLL
Our previous poll asked: In the current economic climate, do you believe that your IT environment offers your business a competitive advantage
Yes, absolutely - 60%
Only in very specific instances - 25%
No, not really - 15%
This week's question: Considering the current economic climate, what are your intentions regarding resourcing of projects in IT?
To give your view, go to www.idc.com/nz
