Beverley Head
Thursday, 12 August 2010 17:42
IT Policy -
Government Tech Policy
Page 1 of 3
The NBN’s Tasmanian network which was switched on today came in 10 per cent under budget. Meanwhile it is delivering speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second over fibre – 10 times the original estimate – and can cope with user downloads of 2 terabytes a month according to NBN Co chief executive Mike Quigley.
While Opposition leader Tony Abbott today labelled the 1Gbps speed as “utterly implausible” Mr Quigley explained to a room of ICT industry leaders in Sydney how the company had developed the network in order to be able to deliver that speed over fibre for no additional investment.
He also confirmed that the Tasmanian network had been set up without access to any Telstra infrastructure, suggesting even greater budget savings might have been possible had the financial heads of agreement between Telstra and the Government been completed earlier, which will allow NBN Co access to Telstra’s infrastructure. As it stands the Tasmanian savings are understood to be around $4 million.
Speaking at an Australian Information Industry Association National Broadband Forum in Sydney Mr Quigley said that the fibre network had been dimensioned to cope with user download demand of 2,000 Gbytes or 2 Terabytes a month. That would be achievable over distances of up to 15 km from the backbone access point.
Mr Quigley said that while he was a big fan of mobility, mobile communications networks were not able to cope with that level of demand. “Why can’t you get 200Gb download plans? Because you can’t dimension the network to do that.
“Mobile is important, but it won’t do the job that fibre will,” said Mr Quigley.
