Fiber in Canberra

Although Australia's capital is no major metropolis, TransACT Communications, a subsidiary of the local power company, has connected 16,000 homes to broadband, cable TV, video on demand, and voice services.

by ISP-Planet Staff [January 3, 2003]

Australia's capital, Canberra, is not a very large city. In 1996, it recorded a population of 307,700. TransACT Communications has nevertheless managed to build and run a competitive fiber optic network offering residential and business cable TV, broadband Internet, and phone services.

The company was founded with the help of equipment manufacturer Marconi, a part-owner. It was founded by the local energy utility ACTEW and uses the utility's electric power poles.

Employees of ACTEW developed the technology during 1996 and 1997, and tested it in customer trials in 1998. The company connected its first 200 customers in 1999, and then acquired funding for a complete city-wide buildout, which began on May 31, 2000.

The company sees itself as a provider of bandwidth over an open network, allowing other companies to compete or complement each other as they provide services to subscribers. Says Paul Brooks, TransACT CTO, "third-party content providers provide services to the connected subscribers, usually under their own name. TransACT is not an ISP. We have six different ISPs available at the 'Head End' for subscribers to choose from, and we collect revenue from the subscriber for the 'access pipe' to the ISP of their choice, without having to do the ISP back-office things like website management, Domain Name registration, etc. Actively assisting our wholesale service partners instead of having a retail ISP arm that competes with them is a significant departure from the traditional business model of a telco/network infrastructure owner in Australia"

There is no local cable TV provider competing with TransACT. Instead, Books says that his main television competition is local satellite TV company FOXTEL. TransACT recently secured a deal to resell FOXTEL satellite service through its fiber optic cables to its subscribers and is running a free trial of the service during Australia's summer (which runs from December through January).

In addition, TransACT broadcasts free-to-air stations and stations from other countries (such as France, Germany, and China) as well as the lowest cost channels available to cable television providers, such as BBCWorld and CNBC (both of which are particularly popular at embassies in the nation's capital.

Another third party company operates a video on demand service for TransACT subscribers, sharing revenues with TransACT, rounding out the services the company provides: television, telephone, broadband, and video on demand.

Brooks says that his company was able to complete disconnect the ILEC infrastructure, "we have deployed our own completely new access cabling, right down to the cable into the or business. Traditional HFC technology is too limiting for business data and telephony use, and ADSL does not provide the bandwidth required for video transmission. We deploy a 4-pair CAT-5 cable, providing TV and Internet through VDSL on one pair, and standard analog POTS (or ISDN BRI) on other pairs. Our telephony service uses a standard TDM access mux (from Marconi) to bring this back to the headend on a set of SDH rings, into a V5.2 concentrator into our own conventional Class-5 switch (Siemens EWSD)."

TransACT did not deploy VoIP because it did not seem possible when the business plan was being developed in 1997 and 1998, and Brooks is glad to be using POTS and ISDN for voice services. He notes, "by using conventional analog telephony, we completely avoid any capital expenditure requirement in CPE for each house, vastly reducing the cost of constructing a new telephony local-loop network."

At last count, the company had over 16,000 subscribers and passed about 40,000 homes, out of roughly 100,000 homes in the first phase of the buildout. The network has five hub sites, about 130 "Supernodes," and over 1,000 street cabinets. Each cabinet can serve about 54 homes.

The buildout is still underway, but Brooks is optimistic that Canberra will be covered by the end of 2003. He says, "our network has 40,000 'homes passed' representing about 40 percent of Canberra. Another 30 percent is under construction, with the whole 'Phase 1' network buildout (roughly 100,000 'homes passed') scheduled to be complete by September of 2003."

Further expansion is conceivable, but for the moment, Brooks and TransACT have plenty to do.

— End