NECA says the current shortfall of personnel with base level skills required in a number of areas dictates that the Australian telecommunications industry will struggle to deliver the proposed NBN.

In particular, the cabling industry will need to have people skilled in the deployment of fibre and fibre-ready infrastructures. This includes tasks from placing the conduits in the street, known as ‘pit and pipe’ through laying and terminating the actual fibre cables themselves.

However, there may be something of a silver lining around the looming cloud of uncertainty. NECA chief executive James Tinslay suggests that there are currently more than 60,000 Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) registered cablers around the country managed by five registrars on behalf of the ACMA.

This huge labour force provides a latent opportunity for upskilling that NECA believes has not been fully explored.

“The nay-sayers will tell you that many of these people are not up to the required standard. The fact is that if installers hold an ACMA registration they have a good base level of regulatory knowledge, safety and basic electrical theory,” he says.

“If we can refresh this labour force, along with some short courses that already exist for industry endorsements in pit and pipe and fibre, these workers would be well on their way to being NBN-ready installers. NECA provides training for these endorsements.”

NECA says this thinking is confirmed by conversations within industry, including carriers.

There may also be a time buffer for upskilling, courtesy of the delay of the release of the Fibre Deployment Bill in Parliament. This will mean that developments that are up to Stage 3 approval by 1 January 2011 will be required to be fibre-ready or have fibre deployed. Fibre-ready means the pit and pipe infrastructure will be in place whereas fibre deployed means that fibre is installed and terminated at the premises.

Reports from the market suggest that some developers are already undertaking to complete the pit and pipe work without a carriers licence. The issue here is one of lifecycle and ownership. A carrier will build this infrastructure to last for several decades. Over the service life of the infrastructure, the carrier is ultimately responsible for maintainance. The focus of a sub contractor working on behalf of a developer may be driven by different imperatives.

Upgrading this requirement to insist that correctly trained workers only are used in this infrastructure deployment will remove a lot of the issues that could surface later.