Australia's NBN Co. offers Cisco expanded role

Equipment vendor Cisco has won a contract worth US$ 38mn over five years to supply equipment for the National Broadband Network (NBN) being built in Australia, commencing immediately.

The contract was awarded by NBN Co. the firm mandated by the Australian government to design, build and operate the new predominantly fibre-based network, which will cover 3.5 million homes by the end of 2015 and nearly 12 million premises nationwide by 2021.

Cisco has been selected to supply Multi-Protocol Layer Switching on Cisco routers and firewalls in NBN Co’s depot, aggregation nodes and other key locations, and will support the Operations Support System (OSS) and Business Support System (BSS) platforms, signalling and timing.

“This equipment will enable communication between NBN Co’s centralised operational staff and IT systems with the fibre, fixed wireless and satellite equipment situated at various locations across Australia,” said Tony Cross, NBN Co’s executive general manager of Network Architecture and Technology.

The win formally expands Cisco’s role in the development of the National Broadband Network. In late 2010, a consortium led by Cisco was awarded the contract to provide NBN Co with a data centre platform.

Together with its technology partners EMC and VMware, Cisco was commissioned to build a scalable platform to run essential applications, including network management, inventory management, customer care, billing, service provisioning and fulfilment systems, as well as a web portal to support customer self-service and the corporate website.