Anthony Doesburg: Work brings fibre optic links closer to home

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.