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Tony Cross to leave Australian national broadband provider on Friday.
NBN on Wednesday confirmed the resignation of chief architect Tony Cross.
"Tony has been with NBN for more than six years and leaves us with a long list of achievements. We expect to see him continue to make his mark in the industry and wish him well," said a Telstra spokesman, in an email to Total Telecom.
Cross previously worked at BT and Telstra; he joined NBN from the latter in 2010, taking on the role of general manager of network architecture and technology. He was promoted to chief architect in July 2014 as part of an overhaul instigated by Bill Morrow shortly after he became CEO.
NBN’s spokesman confirmed an earlier Commsday report which said Cross’s last day will be on Friday, a day before Australia’s general election.
As a state-owned telco in the midst of a massive network rollout, it is no surprise that NBN is a contentious topic for politicians.
NBN was first conceived by the Labor government as a nationwide fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network. Labor was ousted in 2013 by a Liberal/National coalition, which promised to reduce NBN’s costs by adopting a multi-technology mix (MTM) approach led by fibre-to-the-node (FTTN).
This week, former NBN chief Mike Quigley pointed out in a lecture delivered at the Melbourne University Networked Society Institute (MNSI) that the original cost of the FTTP network was put at A$45 billion and would have been completed by 2021.
However, since the adoption of the MTM strategy, the network’s costs have ballooned to A$46 billion-A$56 billion, and it will connect just 8 million premises by 2020.
Under the current federal budget, NBN is due to use up by June 2017 the A$26.5 billion of public money allocated to it. It will be required to raise the remaining A$16.5 billion-A$26.5 billion from private investors.
