Despite going through many different truncated, politicised, budget-affected incarnations, it’s entirely likely that the finish line is finally in sight for the much beleaguered National Broadband Network‘s nation-wide rollout.
The corporation in charge of building the network has announced the signing of a bunch of contracts with five different companies that would, all things being equal, speed up the process of rolling things out, with an ultimate goal of getting it to every home in Australia by 2020.
The NBNCo has dismissed criticism that the rollout has taken too long, but nevertheless championed the new performance-based contracts – a step away from previous construction models – which will get the high speed fibre network into some 11 million homes a lot sooner than previously planned. Or, at least, so the story goes.
The company also hopes the new contracts will help assuage the fears of people in rural areas who have to rely on satellite NBN – around 3% of Australian homes – where a download limit of just 20gb per month is imposed. NBN Chief Executive Bill Morrow claims it thusly:
“It is a major change from what people in the bush have today. Many don’t have anything whatsoever so the first step is to get them some good basic broadband dependability and then we’re going to look at ways to meet the demands for… people that need more than 20 gigabytes of data.”
NBNCo also plans on signing off on additional contracts with more companies to assist with the expedited rollout in the coming months. All companies must comply with a “three key matrix” of performance indicators – safety, quality, and volume – before they can proceed with an install in any given area.
The national rollout will still be conducted under the lesser quality, hybrid-copper/fibre to the node model that the Coalition prefers, rather than the future proofed fibre to the home model as the project was first envisioned.
Photo: Scott Barbour via Getty Images.
