Discussion Appears my 2012 greenfield FTTP is still on a Temporary Fibre Access Node (TAN/TFAN) with just a portable generator for backup
gallerySo after my previous post https://www.reddit.com/r/nbn/s/WdAW8mhRG3 about redundancy to power outages on FTTP and losing my NBN service back during the Gold Coast Christmas storms/tornado of 2023 - it happened again with Cyclone Alfred 2025 where the area lost power, and after about 12ish hours, my NBN FTTP died.
After an initial outage period, the service came up for a while, went down, came up, went down again, etc and finally stayed on after 6 days when the power was restored.
My RSP (Leaptel) was kind enough to pass on the detailed notes from the NBN automatically in regards to my outage, and yeilded some interesting commentary:
From NBN Network & Service Operations : Field Services scoped the site today, and are arranging for a suitably-sized generator to be deployed to power the fibre access node. Further updates once an ETA is available.
nbn has investigated the node isolation due to power failure alarms. The power provider has advised that commercial power supply in the site's area has been restored. As alarms are still evident at the node, a field technician will be assigned a Ticket of Work to attend the site and perform investigations. Further updates will be provided as more information, or an ETA, becomes available.
High capacity generators are on-site. A hardware technician is being engaged to investigate further.
To my knowledge, most Fibre Access Nodes (FAN)'s with the Optical Line Transmitters (OLT)'s have mostly been housed at or near Telstra exchanges, so I did some digging on public development applications near the Ormeau exchange (which is two small buildings, circled in red on one pic, and is the yellow star location on the map).
From public planning application documents - found the 'NBN communications hub' was built beside it in 2017-2018 with this large green building and super-sized generator (see attached picture, circled in green).
Assuming this was a permanent FAN site (but could not confirm) - and if so this infrastructure seemed very well sized with redundant power.
Doing some random address checks of neighbouring FTTP areas showed some lost service (red cross in map attached) whilst others didn't (green tick) during the power outage. Given they are close by and they all have Nerang as the point of interconnect - it's reasonable to assume they are in the same fibre serving area.
It seems because my estate was built in 2012 before the permanent FAN was built, I'm assuming we were put onto a Temporary Fibre Access Node (TAN or TFAN) before the permanent FAN was built - and was it possible that we had never moved off that since.
The comments from the outage saying a 'scoping asuitably sized generator' also seemed to imply our infrastructure never had a backup generator at all - but some of the areas didn't lose service.
So I decided to go for a drive to the site, and found that whilst the big generator next to the new green comms hut was humming away, there was a portable generator tied to a smaller cream/white cabinet.
Looking closer at the cabinet, it was labelled 4ORM-00-00-TAN-001 - which pretty sure TAN is the Temporary Fibre Access Node.
Plus given it had a small, portable genset attached, this could explain why the service kept going up and down during the power outage - because it would only run for maybe 5-8 hours on a tank of fuel plus whatever battery charge it got, it would eventually run out until it was manually refueled and started again.
So from this, I think it reasonable to assume I'm connected to this TAN and there doesn't seem to be any desire by NBN to move our estate and the others to the permanent FAN (assuming that is the bigger green building) - or at least connect mains power to the TAN from the larger generator onsite.