BY Vinodh Seshadri 07 May 2019
Network co-existence can be defined as the co-existence of both legacy ADSL/Special services and NBN services (offered over copper on VDSL2) to customers who are being serviced from a single node. Network co-existence starts from the day that a node becomes ready for service and will continue until all the copper services on a given node are migrated to the NBN.
During the course of this period, a mechanism is installed by NBN at the nodes to reduce the sync speed on the copper line from the node to the customer premises, so that it does not effect the existing ADSL/Special services running from the same node and vice versa.
The presence of co-existence on an NBN node is said to result in decreased NBN speeds to the customers and can potentially lead to a poor customer experience, even a greater poor customer experience where they have no prior knowledge around co-existence.
By educating the customers upfront of the presence of co-existence and its effects on NBN speeds at their location, this may assist providing a more realistic customer expectation around the speed limits of their NBN service for the period of time network co-existence remains in place.
Although the removal of co-existence still does not guarantee a great deal of speed improvements to the customer, but it can improve speeds especially for those customers who have longer length of copper from their homes to the nearest node connected. Other possible factors involved in service speed reductions for customer may include RSP purchasing lesser NBN CVC bandwidth due to cost, RSP's network congestion, length of the copper cables to the premise, quality of the copper cables, in-home copper cabling, modem restrictions, etc.
