The company rolling out the National Broadband Network, NBN Co, has lost its chief technical officer, Dennis Steiger, as part of sweeping changes to the senior leadership team.
Mr Steiger has left after spending just less than three years at NBN Co and was initially recruited to bring the hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) portion of the NBN up to speed.
He subsequently took overall command of the technology pathways in June last year following the departure of NBN Co’s chief network architect Tony Cross.
NBN Co boss Bill Morrow said that Mr Steiger, recruited from Canadian telco Shaw Communications, had played an important part in expanding and testing the number of access technologies that will be used to make premises ready to receive a service.
“Dennis Steiger has made the difficult decision to leave NBN and pursue new opportunities,” he said in an internal staff message seen by The Australian.
The NBN Co technology office will be led by former Vodafone Hutchison Australia executive and former associate principal with McKinsey & Co, Tom Roets.
Mr Roets was until recently at the customer and commercial division but will take on the role of executive general manager of future technology and architecture.
The reshuffle in the technology team isn’t the only management change at NBN Co, with the company’s head of service assurance Lincoln Jurd leaving in pursuit of new opportunities.
Mr Jurd’s position as EGM, service assurance management, will be filled by Ian Bentley.
“With his vast experience in process-based scaling and end-user experience, Ian is accountable for sharpening our focus on our end-user experience across all practices,” Mr Morrow said. Other executive appointments include Toby Ryston-Pratt as head of customer activations, Ankur Jain as head of business process excellence and Susan Huggett EGM of migrations and disconnections.
NBN Co is looking to fill the vacancy of general manager leading business transformation.
The executive reshuffle at NBN Co comes with the company still facing an uphill task with regards to hitting its rollout targets. The expansion of the NBN footprint has also led to an uptick in end-customer complaints on the quality of the service received and a renewed focus on the tension between telcos and NBN Co on wholesale access prices.
Mr Steiger leaves NBN Co at a time when the fibre to the distribution point (FTTDp) technology is about to hit the real-world testing stage and the company is starting to reinforce its fixed wireless offering.
It recently hit gigabit speeds on a wireless network demonstration using its 2.3GHz and 3.4GHz spectrum holdings. In March, it also lifted the peak wireless download speed from 50 megabits per second to 100 Mbps.
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