From snowy mountains and sun-baked deserts to the steamy tropical north, Australia has begun wiring its vast expanse with a high-tech broadband network in a giant project being closely followed abroad.
Workmen are already digging trenches in Tasmania, the first step in a US$37 billion scheme that Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd calls the country’s biggest ever infrastructure venture.
The ambitious plan aims to connect 90 percent of homes, including remote Outback settlements and sprawling coastal cities, with fiber-optic cable by 2017, accelerating lagging network speeds and boosting the economy.
PHOTO: AFP
The sheer scale of the project has drawn interest from foreign governments including the US, where President Barack Obama has outlined similar plans.
Engineers will lay cable across 7.7 million square kilometers of often challenging terrain that covers an area twice the size of the EU.
“There’s no kidding about it, it’s a massive job,” telecommunications analyst Paul Budde said. “You have to physically go to 10 million premises and bring a cable there, either [by] digging it or via [power] poles and then obviously it’s not just having the cable, you have to have the installation in the house.”
Specialized French digging machines have been shipped to Tasmania to lay the first of millions of kilometers of fiber-optic cable. By next June, three pilot towns are expected to be enjoying connection speeds of 100 megabits per second.
Just 0.1 percent of Australians are linked to fiber-optic cable, with most accessing the Internet over the 100-year-old copper telephone network, prompting Rudd to call the country a “broadband backwater.”
Rudd, announcing the project in April, said Australia had some of the developed world’s slowest Internet speeds and lowest access rates.
Some Outback communities rely on dial-up connections and others have no Internet at all.
Industry expert Reg Coutts, who advised the government on the network, said the venture had attracted top-level attention in the US and other countries.
“There’s really an absolute interest, particularly in America, but also in Europe,” he said.
“People are asking: ‘What the hell are you doing and how are you doing it?’ People of course are skeptical,” he said.
Laying the network was only the first step, he said, with the real challenge transitioning 10 million customers from old TV, telephone and Internet networks.
“That alone, we have never seen on that magnitude anywhere in the world,” Budde said.
Once laid, there was “really no limit” to what the fiber network could do, said Ravi Bhatia, CEO of Primus Telecom and spokesman for industry consortium Terria.
He said technological advances in areas such as satellite mapping would make the roll-out easier than it would have been even three years ago, allowing for “smart” deployment of resources and machines to dig and pull cable.
“By using the latest technology building this network we create another set of skills which we can then export to other countries and build their networks,” Bhatia said.
Coutts said there was “a lot of infrastructure that could potentially be utilized in the NBN [National Broadband Network],” but estimated that it was only about 10 percent of what was needed.
“Most of what’s going to go on is purely civil works, actually pulling in and splicing optical fiber to replace the copper,” he said.
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