Cornered! is a blog devoted, most of the time anyway, to telecommunications: local and global issues, technology, people and trends from the perspective of someone who's been reporting, analysing and commenting on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition). Sometimes serious, sometimes flippant, sometimes frivolous. Controversial, analytical, informative, amusing, but never boring; a vehicle for examinations of important issues and observations on my encounters and experiences in an industry where polarised views and hyperbole are the norm.
Blog
Technology news and Jobs 
Cornered! FTTN is all very well, but what about the long haul
Cornered! FTTN is all very well, but what about the long haul | FTTN is all very well, but what about the long haul |
|
| by Stuart Corner | |
| Thursday, 13 March 2008 | |
|
Page 1 of 4 Somewhere along the line that $600m became $1 billion and went to the Optus/Elders consortium, we had an election, the ALP came to power and is now going all out to deliver on its policy promise. But back in early 2007 one of the bidding consortia going after the $600m was coming from a different position: instead of promising to deliver services to end users it was offering to provide a very substantial upgrade to Australia's long haul fibre network, arguing that backhaul cost, not access, was the hurdle at which competitive providers of broadband services in regional and rural Australia stumbled. Putting sufficient capacity at attractive prices into regional centres was all that was needed to allow competitive access providers to spring up and start offering affordable services. The consortium comprised Nextgen Networks, IPStar, Broadcast Australia and Agile Communications (Internode). It promised to install 10,200kms of new fibre infrastructure comprised of a new north-south cable linking Nextgen's east-west cable to Alice Springs and Darwin; a new cable across the north of Western Australia and down the west coast to Darwin; a new link across Bass Strait to provide, along with the fibre laid with the Basslink power cable, Telstra-independent protected capacity to Tasmania; extensive new fibre in Tasmania; several new fibre links around Victoria and South Australia. Even with that impressive offering it was not optimistic. An executive with one of the partners suggested that if the consortium were awarded the contact the minister would not be able to get up and say anything specific about which rural communities (and the voters therein) would be getting broadband at what speeds, when and at what price. CONTINUED |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
