Optus adds NBN HFC to wholesale offerings

Customers of Optus Wholesale will be able to sell services over the National Broadband Network’s hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) infrastructure, the telco has announced.

Optus announced today that it would be one of the first wholesale providers offering HFC services, most of which will be on HFC infrastructure formerly owned by Telstra.

NBN last year dramatically revised downward the number of premises it expects to connect via HFC.

The government-owned company largely ditched the planned use of Optus’ HFC assets. Barring houses in one suburb in Queensland, most premises in the Optus HFC footprint are expected to be connected via fibre to the distribution point (FTTdp).

NBN still expects to connect some 2.5 million to 3.2 million premises via HFC, CEO Bill Morrow said last year. The Optus-owned HFC network will still be shut down under a deal signed with NBN.

Optus Wholesale offers its customers access to all 121 NBN Points of Interconnect (POIs). The telco said it will offer wholesale NBN services out of eight data centres, including facilities Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, and a further data centre earmarked for Adelaide.

“This means wholesale customers can realise improved efficiencies, and offer lower latency for end customers, for example a WA based wholesale end user will experience better latency from a WA based data centre, rather than one previously based in Sydney – due to the data centre’s proximity to the end customer,” Optus Wholesale head of marketing and strategy John Castro said in a statement.

“We see significant opportunity for our business in the wholesale NBN segment,” Castro said

“Optus’ wholesale NBN offering provides Optus Wholesale customers with cost effective access via a single or multiple aggregation points around the country over our Carrier Ethernet network.”

Optus announced today that broadband wholesaler The Grex Group had signed on as a customer of its NBN offering.

In mid-2016 Optus announced it had made a range of improvements to its NBN wholesale offering, including increased backend automation to support the Residential Broadband over NBN (RBBoNBN) product.