Wholesaling nbn™ with total automation.Phillip Britt, Managing DirectorWideband and Aussie Broadband.

Our network aggregation agreement was holding us back.

Aussie Broadband’s situation (Sep-16).

_ Connected to 12 nbn™ POIs with ~10,000 customers on our own network to the nbn™.

_ We used a wholesaler to connect to the remaining 109 POIs through a national aggregation agreement.

Plagued with problems.

_ Major delays in nbn™ ordering and fault lodgment due to manual processes with their systems.

_ No control over our CVC and contention ratios.

_ Significant congestion within their network.

_ Unhappy customers connected to us via them were damaging for our brand and reputation.

Wholesale hell.

The current wholesale market is broken.

Legacy systems and processes.

_ Existing wholesale players have tried to bolt nbn™ into their legacy ADSL/PSTN focused systems.

_ They have not directly tied these interfaces to NBNCo’s B2B systems which has meant a “swivel chair” interface is required.

_ When volume scales up, these systems break, causing more delays to end users.

_ Current wholesale players were reluctant to share information on backhaul congestion, leading to finger pointing between RSPs, wholesalers and nbn™.

The problem.

Having our own national network to the nbn™ puts us in control of our own destiny.

The decision was made.

_ We rolled out our own national network to all 121 nbn™ POIs.

_ Using Telstra Wholesale as the backhaul provider, who supply us dedicated 1G and 10G wavelengths.

_ We now have full control over CVC bandwidth and can scale within 15 minutes’ notice.

_ This allows us to run a congestion-free network.

Our new national network had the makings for a great wholesale service we could offer other RSPs.

Rolling out our network.

We had the network, and we had the experience from the other side.

Learning from experiences.

_ Our experience with others gave us insight into ways we could deliver a better wholesale service to RSPs.

_ Of many issues, a major one was delays from having to deal indirectly with nbn™ via the wholesaler.

_ A system that improved this process was needed.

Automation is key.

_ We decided to develop a wholesale system with total automation that makes interactions between the RSP and nbn™ completely seamless.

A network built for wholesale.

Integrating to the nbn™ B2B is not a walk in the park.

Challenges we had:

_ Big learning curve to integrate against the ebXMLsystem that nbn™ uses.

_ Needed to modify Jentrata, an open source ebXMLinterface to allow it to operate at scale.

_ Ongoing certification requirements to stay up to date with new nbn™ B2B versions.

_ Had to complete over 120 different test scenarios through tightly controlled test windows.

_ Now fully on-boarded for all current nbn™ technologies and processes.

It hasn’t been easy.

A wholesale system that removes us as the ‘middleman’ between the RSP and nbn™.

Custom-building our B2B wholesale system.

_ Wholesale B2B and portal to enable other RSPs to enter the nbn™ market without the need to connect to nbn™ directly.

_ Our internally developed software system fully integrates with the nbn™ B2B system and the Cisco 9K network platform.

_ Our ‘no touch’ system lets RSPs process high-volume orders, create connection appointments, perform network diagnostics and lodge faults with total automation – we’ve cut out the middleman.

Automating wholesale nbn™.

Visibility over faults and trouble tickets is key to keeping customers happy.

Giving RSPs direct access to the right tools.

_ Real time access to nbn™ test and diagnostic tools along with specific Wideband tools for troubleshooting.

_ Direct access to log assurance tickets with nbn™ with no ‘middleman’ intervention.

_ Ability to escalate tickets to Wideband staff for faults that require further escalation within nbn™.

Assurance.

Demo:Get nbn™ quicker than a pizza.Powered by Wideband.

Creating a wholesale system with total automation wasn’t easy, but we were up to the challenge.

The system challenges.

The development of the system.

Our software development team had some major tasks to make it happen:

_ Usability assurance – Ensure the system is easy to use and deals with the quirks of nbn™ on the end user’s behalf (including their business logic). Complexity is unwarranted.

_ Reliability is key – The system needed to be reliable, and provide excellent up-time to all access seekers.

_ Eating our own dog food – To ensure consistency between our API and portal offerings, we need to demonstrate to access seekers the efficiency of our B2B by implementing it as the backend for our portal.

Everything you can do in the portal you can do in the B2B.

Eating our own dog food.

Wideband Portal

Wideband B2B

nbn™ B2B

RSP Customer

RSP Customer

Re-defining what ‘superfast’ means.

Progress to date.

Our system is the first of its kind.

We’ve made leaps and bounds with our new system:

_ Reduced barrier to entry – one of our first wholesale customers integrated against our B2B in under two weeks.

_ Superfast ordering – 1 minute 46 seconds is our fastest connection time, from order submission through to completion.

_ Quick churn – enabled our first wholesale customer to change wholesalers in under two weeks.

Our wholesale system serves a greater purpose in our business operation.

The bigger picture.

Retail, wholesale & corporate.

_ Our tightly integrated software system allows us to take nbn™ retail orders from the Aussie Broadband website to fully provisioned in under 15 minutes on average with no human intervention.

_ Our system has helped us grow to over 45,000 retail connections today, growing at a rate of 1,000+ connections a week.

_ This essentially has helped the business scale to significant order volumes with a minimal increase to staffing and overheads.

We still have some way to go, and many challenges ahead.

What’s next for us?

We’re not quite finished yet.

There’s still a number of challenges ahead:

_ Total automation of CVC bandwidth management.

_ Keeping ahead of the backhaul game to ensure that we don’t become congestion victims of our own success.

_ Further developing our systems to ensure we stay at the forefront of the industry in process automation.

and we’ll continue to take a stand for no bullsh*t in the industry around peak-time congestion issues.