QCN Fibre, a new government owned telecommunications company in Queensland, Australia, is rolling out Ciena’s Waveserver Ai compact interconnect platform powered with programmable 400G coherent optics across its edge environment. QCN Fibre will provide backhaul to all six Queensland NBN Points of Interface (PoI) in Toowoomba, Bundaberg, Rockhampton, Mackay, Townsville, and Cairns. QCN Fibre is also deploying Ciena’s MEF 3.0 certified 5170 Platform.
“Our launch strategy was to activate services to these key regional centres by mid-2020. We have achieved that,” said QCN Fibre’s Chief Executive Officer, Derek Merdith. “Now, we continue to improve Coverage, Capacity and Competition throughout Queensland, through connecting to all 22 NBN PoIs.”
“As a small and dynamic organisation, we can quickly adapt our strategies to meet our customers’ needs. When we inspected the more than 12,000km of fibre we inherited from our parent companies, Energy Queensland and Powerlink, and considered current market conditions, connecting to all 22 PoIs became both technically achievable and a competitive necessity.”
“Today, there are only two primary backhaul providers to the six regional PoIs. Whilst NBN provides some competition, small ISPs must ultimately rely on a limited range of suppliers for backhaul services from the PoI to Brisbane. Regional backhaul currently costs several times that of metropolitan backhaul.”
