Internode boss slams NBN, as 100mbps FTTH announced

Staff Writers
Friday, 27 February 2009 06:39

IT Industry - Market

South Australian-based ISP, Internode, says it has ‘upped the ante’ with its announcement of a 100mpbs fibre to the home broadband service, while CEO Simon Hackett ridiculed the proposed National Broadband Network’s target speed of 12mbps.

The Internode boss took a swipe at the NBN, claiming Internode’s testing showed its FTTH service was delivering outcomes at up to eight times faster than the NBN 12 Mbps target speed.

Hackett said Internode’s ability to deliver a 25 Mbps FTTH service for less than $50 a month and a “true 100 Mbps service for less than $100” demonstrated that technology was not the barrier to deploying a world-best broadband system in Australia.

Hackett was critical of the NBN, claiming that “NBN speeds stopped being the future quite some time ago. Significantly, FTTH is scaleable in the future to speeds far greater than that again.”

In a further broadside at the NBN, Hackett said Internode’s initiatives demonstrated that “in the real world, the future for residential broadband is clearly fibre to the home.”

Partnering with housing estate telecoms specialist OptiComm, Internode boats it is now delivering Australia’s fastest commercial broadband services for retail customers around the country and says that with its FTTH , the quoted downstream speed is actually delivered to the home’s ethernet port, unlike the “best effort” speeds provided by traditional ADSL2+ services.

Hackett says Internode’s FTTH is a “future-proof” broadband service that could operate for decades, and “just as copper served Australia well during the 20th century, fibre will provide the country’s nervous system for the 21st century.”

While government, industry and all the experts and media commentators ponder and debate Australia’s broadband future, Hackett maintains that FTTH is now emerging as the “broadband delivery model of choice internationally,” and he quotes figures from the Fiber-to-the-Home Council that show that there are already more than 13 million FTTH-connected homes in Japan, six million in the US, a similar number in China and nearly two million FTTH subscribers in Europe.

Hackett said Internode’s first home fibre services would be connected at Queensland’s Fernbrooke estate, a development by Urban Pacific at Redbank Plains, south-west of Brisbane, where more than 1,000 homes had been built around 20 hectares of recreational space and parkland.

Amongst “a dozen other projects,” Hackett said Internode and OptiComm would deliver fibre to the home services at the Lochiel Park and Northgate developments in South Australia.