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Fuzzy Logic ‘Australia Connected’ sounds pretty good – now what?
Fuzzy Logic ‘Australia Connected’ sounds pretty good – now what? | ‘Australia Connected’ sounds pretty good – now what? |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Tuesday, 19 June 2007 | |
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With the Federal Government’s announcement that they have awarded the project to ‘broadband the bush’ to OPEL, a joint venture wholesale company between Optus and Elders, rural and regional users will finally get plugged into the national high-speed Internet backbone starting from September this year. The plan involves $958 million of government funding, which will be matched by OPEL with a total of $917 million in cash and in-kind dollars. The Govt has been very keen to stress their $958 million contribution does not come from the $2 billion ‘Communications Fund’, and say that this separate fund will shortly be protected by legislation so the interest earnings providing ongoing funding to maintain the network, supposedly forever, and so that future governments of whatever persuasion will be unable to raid it to fund other projects. In total, $1.875 billion is going towards to construction of a new national high speed wholesale network that will, according to the Govt, deliver a mix of fibre optic, ADSL2+ and WIMAX wireless broadband to rural and regional areas. The network will offer speeds of 12Mbps at prices between $35 and $60 per month June 30, ’09, with a total of 426 exchanges to be upgraded to ADSL 2+ starting September 2007, with 1361 ‘state of the art’ WIMAX also being built, all of which will, according to the government, deliver speeds “20–40 times faster than most people are on today, to almost 9.5 million premises including in areas such as Birdsville and Bedourie and the elimination of almost all broadband blackspots in areas including outer metropolitan Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane.” The Govt also says that OPEL will install 15 000 kilometres of fibre optic cable open access backhaul (including two links across the Bass Strait to Tasmania) to extend the broadband highways that link rural areas back to major cities – something that will take time and requires enabling legislation, but which will reduce backhaul costs by 30% from regional areas to metropolitan areas. It’s important to note that this fibre network is different to the FTTN network being fought over by Telstra and the G9 consortium of telecommunications companies, with the Govt promising a decision on that to come in the not-too-distant future to get the issue resolved before going to a federal election. Given that the Govt is promising that 99% of Australians will be covered by the new network, the remaining 1% who are in such remote locations that they can’t be covered even by WIMAX will receive a broadband subsidy of $2750 per household, which presumably would pay for a satellite connection, which would be handy for households in remote locations that haven’t already installed a two-way satellite dish. The use of WIMAX is very interesting, as it can be thought of as Wi-Fi on steroids, able to cover an area 20kms around each base station instead of 100 metres around a Wi-Fi base station in your home or office. WIMAX has also raised some questions, with Telstra notably asking about reliability. Telstra's Next-G already provides much of what the 'Broadband Connect' plan promises in terms of coverage and increased speeds - so what's missing as part of this proposal, what is Telstra's strong response to the proposal, and what's wrong with Next-G? Please read onto page 2 now. |
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