OMG what the F are POI? A legitimate question, at least if you understand the mind numbing acronyms the telco industry adopt to describe their infrastructure.Our telco boffins are of course not alone in having caught this insidious disease. Most educated Australians in management positions create these BIG letter acronyms to our collective bemusement. Popular too are weasel words like 'digitally arranged visual evidence' that neatly dodge accountability and isolate a critical examiner with ease (That bit of silliness is a security camera video).
The problem is if you are trying to advocate for a popular technology project or product and you use increasingly distant terms to sell your attributes, you metaphorically shoot yourself in the mouth. BOOM as in boom, you've lost us.
So it comes to the increasingly difficult issue of explaining the importance of modern telephone exchanges to a public hungry for knowledge about the National Broadband Network (NBN) roll out. The telecommunications industry call these exchanges 'Points Of Interconnect' (POI) They are really important as the ACCC - Australian Competition and Consumer Commission have told us and the NBN Company as the builders of the nation's new broadband network.
Basically as far as I can decipher the ACCC has insisted that there now be built 120 odd of these new telephone exchanges instead of the originally planned 14. The commission's rationale appears to be that this will enhance competition on the new network. Well that may be the case, but of course it is also much more expensive to build 120 instead of 14 of these super exchanges. Who is going to pay for them and more importantly where are they going to be located?
On the question of who can pay for 120 exchanges? Early signals indicate only the big companies like Telstra and Optus can afford a full nation wide spread. On the question of where these exchanges are or will be located is a vexed issue, because the location of these will heavily influence where the NBN will be rolled out and how early.
In other words my regional friends lobbying like tom cats to get on an early roll out schedule, the location of these super exchanges may very well be the factor that gets you a NBN ticket or not.
Where these exchanges are or will be is another investigation worth an acronym or two, can I suggest WTF R D POI?
Whats wrong with selecting 120 existing Telstra exchange buildings from the many thousands that exist around the country for locating the POI's? Exchange buildings were once used for voice call switching equipment, that stuff has gone by the wayside. Today the real value of these buildings is that they are the nodes of the cable ducting for the customer access network.
ReplyDeleteNothing wrong with using the Telstra exchanges, but for the fact they are Telstra Exchanges and by definition we're back to where we started from, a reliance on Telstra to give access to all the other service providers on a disgruntled basis. That's why we're building an NBN.
ReplyDeleteFunny we used to have a great national telecom network called Telecom/Telstra before the botched privatisation.