Ergon Energy subsidiary Nexium Telecommunications has enabled high-speed fibre-optic networks in some of Queensland’s most remote areas.
Nexium enables the delivery of high speed broadband services into areas where there are usually very limited telecommunications services.
This subsidiary of regional electricity distributor Ergon Energy achieves this by using the fibre optic cable (FOC) assets that belong to a range of suppliers, such as utilities, railways and customer-owned FOCs and assembling them into a single service over which it implements and manages a high-grade, highly available IP telecommunications network.
A recent example of Nexium’s approach occurred when a customer was developing a remote greenfield mining site. The customers had sought a high-speed, reliable data service from the normal telecommunications providers, only to be told that nothing was available or came at a very high capital cost to establish the services.
When Nexium was approached it investigated the company, the phase of the development, the proposed power infrastructure for the site, and other utility or transport infrastructure and FOC that may be available to use in a solution.
The investigation by Nexium found that the electricity distributor was building a feeder to a new substation in the vicinity of the mine and FOC was to be installed with the new power feeder to that substation for network management. Nexium was then able to negotiate with the customer to build FOC cable along the power feeder they were building, from the mining site administration area back to the vicinity of the new substation, to connect the power grid.
Nexium then arranged for the missing link between the FOCs between the two locations to be constructed and then established a high-speed IP network connection over the FOCs back to the Nexium network connection point.
By engaging with a range of suppliers, partners and the customer, Nexium was able to identify a cost-effective way to deliver a high-speed, high grade service to the customer at an incremental cost, compared to building a service that did not leverage the existing infrastructure.
Nexium has delivered a large number of services using this approach.
