The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, who officially opened the Intellicentre 2 data centre this afternoon, noted that Macquarie Telecom had described the building of the centre as a “companion investment” to the NBN. She said that the advent of the network meant; “Telecommunications in this country will finally be fully contested and competitive and high speed broadband will reach every home and business.
“Few investments will be more important to our success in this Asian century.”
Ms Gillard said that; “The Internet adds $50 billion a year to our economy and that is set to increase to 70 billion a year by 2016. Each 10 percentage point increase in broadband penetration can add 1.3 per cent to the GSP of a high income country and yet here in our own nation as a share of GDP the internet generates about 25 per cent less than our peers in other developed markets.
“That’s a sign we didn’t get everything right in the 90s by leaving Telstra as a vertically integrated monopoly and only cabling up the richest areas of our cities. The biggest and the hardest parts of the job we needed to do were left undone,” she added.
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He also spruiked the green credentials of the new data centre, which he said was more important than ever given the Government’s carbon pricing scheme. He pointed to the stark difference to older corporate computer rooms that “guzzle power.”
Macquarie Telecom’s new data centre will have a team of 60 people operating it according to Aidan Tudehope, the managing director of the Hosting division of the business. With a Tier 3 rating the centre has been designed to achieve a power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.3 which means that for every $1 spent powering computers, 30 cents is spent on cooling or ancillary power.
