FED: Aust to join information superhighway's fast lane

AAP General News (Australia)
04-10-2009
FED: Aust to join information superhighway's fast lane

Eds: with pic "Fibre optics broadband" on AAP Image



By Karlis Salna

CANBERRA, April 10 AAP - The final frontier, these are the voyages of the starship
Rudd, its eight year mission to explore new frontiers in broadband technology, to boldly
go where no Australian government has gone before.

The enterprise in this case will be a public-private arrangement.

Under the plan, a new company, of which the government will be the majority owner,
will invest up to $43 billion over eight years to build and operate the network.

The new scheme will deliver broadband services of up to 100 megabits per second - 100
times faster than current speeds - and will be available to 90 per cent of Australian
homes, schools and workplaces.

Optus, one of the companies that had bid to build the national broadband network, has
described the new plan as "visionary" while Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says it will be
the "single largest nation building infrastructure project in Australia's history".

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says the super fast broadband network will have
the "capacity to change the way people live their lives".

"This will leap Australia to the top of the broadband table, this is state-of-the-art
... it is the end game," he told AAP.

"It allows access to e-health applications, it allows e-education, it creates virtual
classrooms, virtual consultations, virtual access to nurses if you need medical advice.

"It is a transformative technology."

But it's not quite the end game. It's only the beginning.

In South Korea, work is already underway on upgrading a 100 megabits network to one
that transmits at one gigabit per second, or 1,000 megabits.

The work in South Korea is set to be complete in 2012, making Australia's network look
clunky and obsolete well before it's switched on in 2018.

It's life, but not as we know it - yet.

But upgrading Australia's network to match that of South Korea's will not be a problem.

The speed of Australia's network will only be limited by the hardware at each end of
the line. The fibre optic infrastructure that will be rolled out under Labor's grand plan
is future proof.

With the completion of the national broadband network project, Australia will be catapulted
to the vanguard of communications technology, and into the information superhighway's
fast lane.

Optus head of government and regulatory affairs Maha Krishnapillai says the decision
to go for fibre-to-the-home is "a fantastic outcome" for the telecommunications sector
and Australia.

"They have gone further than we even asked for and they've leapt straight to the end
game," he told AAP.

"It puts us at the forefront up there with Korea and Japan in terms of broadband speeds
and broadband investment."

"It's absolutely visionary in our view, and we absolutely welcome it because it addresses
all of the issues that we've have been raising for quite some time."

Under the new plan, instead of the fibre optic cable being laid out to the boxes at
the end of the street, it will reach all the way to the premises.

Under fibre-to-the-node, the "last mile" would have been via Telstra's copper wire network.

The new plan will end Telstra's stranglehold on the sector by severing the need for
the copper wire infrastructure.

"It means that Telstra can no longer slow down and stall broadband in its own interests
to retain its margins of 60 per cent plus," Krishnapillai says.

"We will have a broadband network that will give us a level playing field."

Labor plans to go further.

On Tuesday, the government released a discussion paper and called for public comment
on the regulatory framework that governs the telco sector.

The key theme of this discussion paper is Labor's long-held desire to have Telstra's
retail and wholesale arms separated.

"The regulatory situation in the market place has failed," Senator Conroy says.

"We have said consistently and we have voted against in parliament the current operational
separation regime that manages Telstra."

"We have said consistently that we need regulatory reform, we've got to have better
competition, we've got to have cheaper prices and faster speeds for people and regulatory
reform is the first step for that."

"The ultimate objective of building the national broadband network locks it in," he says.

Unsurprisingly, the opposition has been scathing of the latest broadband plan.

"The government have had to in a very humiliating fashion admit that their 2007 policy
on broadband has blown up in their face," opposition communications spokesman Nick Minchin
says.

"They've not been able to deliver on their 2007 promise, so to cover up that policy
failure, they've rolled out a new 2009 policy which is even more grandiose, and frankly
even less deliverable."

Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull warns it is a risky commercial venture.

"[Mr Rudd] has no way of knowing whether this is going to be commercially viable or
not, and certainly has been utterly reckless in encouraging Australians to invest in their
venture when he has no proper basis for assuring them the investment would be safe or
worthwhile," Turnbull says.

"This makes the Whitlam era look modest and unassuming. This is recklessness on a gigantic
scale."

Optus, however, has already declared its interest in being a part of the new company.

"The key is we obviously want to see the detail, and we'll look forward to that discussion
with government," Krishnapillai says.

"But on the basis of what we've seen so far it will be a highly attractive investment."

Even Telstra, the 800-pound gorilla of the telco sector, has indicated there could
be a thawing in its often frosty relations with the government.

Following Tuesday's announcement, Telstra Chairman Donald McGauchie says Australia's
largest telco is looking forward to "having constructive discussions with the government
at the earliest opportunity".

"There is a lot to absorb in the government's announcement and we will consider every
aspect in detail," Mr McGauchie says.

Of course, one of the downsides is the new network will give politicians the capacity
to beam their announcements straight into your loungeroom, in high-definition, across
a multitude of formats, all at the speed of lightning.

Beam me up Scotty.

AAP kms/ss/de

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