Strata managers and the NBN

You need to check the contract with your Strata Manager (SM) to see what is included.

Our SM did offer to register our building with NBN & liaise with them on our behalf but as we have tech skills on the strata committee we are doing this ourselves.

At the very least I recommend your Owner’s Corporation read & register your lifts, fire control & alarm systems here:

https://www.nbnco.com.au/connect-home-or-business/information-for-home/device-compatibility.html

We also conducted an audit of lots with medical alarms & commercial telecommunications systems.

Melanie, I can confirm what your SM has said is correct – that being ‘nbn ready’ only means that individual lots can make their own arrangements with their preferred provider to connect to NBN. Your choice.

Nothing to do with other building services such as lifts or emergency lines. However, your SC or SM will need to register all such lines with NBN as Tharra advises – to avoid issues down the track.

In the case of emergency lines, our fire monitoring company installed a dual mobile sim system which turned out much cheaper than the copper lines we had been using.

We are still working on a lift solution – but not with NBN as their current offering is too expensive.

SnOwl – My scheme has an Otis lift. In our latest Minutes we have decided to do this:

“It has been identified that as the lift emergency communication system is linked to the landline phone system, this will no longer work once the NBN is “switched on”. Otis has provided a quotation for the installation of a Cellular Gateway and sim card system as a solution. This will provide 2 hour talk time in the event of a power failure, from within the lift car.”

We have decided to seek another quote as a comparison, and will move forward from there. 

We have two lifts in our building in QLD. The building is no longer connected to the copper landline but is connected to the coaxial NBN cable.

Those residents that had landline home phones could retain those phones but had to connect them to the NBN cable. The issue with that is those residents lose that home phone connection whenever there is a power failure or an outage to upgrade the NBN network. Without power, the NBN phone line in each of those units doesn’t function.

Which brings us to the emergency phones in our two lifts. We don’t have those phones connected to the NBN as they wouldn’t work if there was a power failure to our building. Instead, we have a battery-powered lift module that allows the lifts’ emergency phones to work off the mobile phone network. 

The emergency phone module was fitted by the lift manufacturer’s technicians for a total cost of just over $3,800. The lift manufacturer provided the SIM card for the module.

At the time we replaced the lifts’ emergency phone system, the NBN Corp did not have a solution for what to do about replacing the emergency phone landline connection with an NBN connection that worked during a power outage, etc.

In the pre-NBN era and now, anyone stuck in our lifts could/can choose to use their mobile phones to dial the emergency 1300 number as long as their mobile phone had/has enough coverage in the lift. We’re also fortunate to have an uninterrupted line-of-sight ‘connection’ to the nearby mobile phone tower for our area.

With regard to a building being NBN-ready, buildings have to have coaxial cable installed and connected to the NBN network. In our building, the NBN cable was brought underground into the building and then to each of its nine levels along an existing service duct containing water meters and pipes.

On each level, the cables were then connected through the corridor ceiling cavities to an access panel above each unit’s entrance. Owners were responsible for connecting their unit to the NBN. Some owners had a cable technician do this for a cost of around $200 so that no cables were visible within their units but were hidden behind the ceiling and wall panels. Other unit owners had their internet service providers arrange the connection as part of the installation of the NBN modems. 

The cable tech. most likely will have to drill through a unit’s firewall when the NBN cable is brought into that unit. If that is the case, the tech. is required to use a heat-resistant sealant where the cable passes through the firewall. It is usual for the tech. to photograph that this has been carried out. From memory, the fire-resistant sealant was purple-coloured.  

It was ironic that when our building was constructed, it was pre-wired with fibre optic cable in anticipation of the implementation of a fibre-optic NBN network.