How Singapore is Taking on the Really Big Challenges

This is interesting, Martin. The argument over who should fund - and own - inftastructure has raged for a long time. We can see various approaches or experiments in other fields that may give hints on the pros and cons that arise, and these may be relevant for our industry also.

Utilities, such as power and water, have long had this issue, the railways are another example, and of course the way that various countries addressed telecoms liberalisation, broadband cabling and internet is directly relevant experience.

I remember a strong viewpoint twenty years or so ago in the UK, when the Government was trying to encourage infrastructure development for mobile telecoms and in parallel pushing the spread of cable networks. This suggested that major infrastructure, like backbone networks and nation-wide cabling, was essentially a natural monopoly and should be operated under central. Government control.  Commercial exploitation on top of this would then be where there was diversity and competition.

Now, this is not a political model that appeals to all, and we did then see in the UK the development, at great expense, of overlapping and competitive infrastructures, and now we can see that commercial mergers and acquisitions have led to a good deal of convergence after all.

The Singapore approach seems to be picking up thinking around that idea of a central, nationally-owned infrastructure. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in practice.

Martin, I agree with your comment that this is something to watch as more and more governments are looking at how they can enable the equal open access whilst avoiding multiple companies digging our roads for laying down fiber to our homes. The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA)’s was the first government to actually fund a project to expand Singapore’s leading knowledge-based economy through an Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) ecosystem capable of allowing new specialist players to enter, compete and thrive at different points in the value chain. The new Next Gen Nationwide Broadband Network (NBN) aims to provide an open, price competitive, ultra-high speed broadband network, enabling new ways of doing business and enhancing the lifestyles of its people. In conjunction with e-government, manpower, and industry development programmes, providing fibre connectivity to every household and business in the country by 2012, enabling Singapore to build a vibrant local market for diverse, cross-industry applications.

As you mentioned below, IDA constructed a 3 tier model with the NetCo managing the passive network (contract awarded to OpenNet), the OpCo managing the active connectivity (contract awarded to Nucleus Connect) and the Retail Service Providers (RSPs) managing the relationship with the consumer and enterprises. What is also very interesting is the fact that everyone realized how critical the automation of OSS and BSS processes has to be to succeed in that model.

To that point, during the press conference held as part of Nucleus Connect’s contract signing ceremony, David Storrie, CEO of Nucleus Connect, said that “much more than the Network, the OSS/BSS is the cornerstone of the commercial success. We will define and implement public APIs for 3rd parties to be able to onboard their applications on the NBN.”

Alcatel-Lucent having been awarded the OSS and BSS contracts for both OpenNet and Nucleus Connect, we have leveraged a broad range of standards to be applied to the solution and carried through to the implementation which include: TMD, TAM, eTOM, SID, ITU-T G.805, TMF CASMIM, SOA and JSR. In fact we will apply TMF SID modeling for the B2B services to facilitate interoperability with external OpCo, RSPs and Qualified Parties. This data model will be applied using an SOA based web services B2B approach.

.

With the short delivery time frame, you can expect an update by Management World Nice!