Mike Quigley says it is better NBN Co’s planners stay away from the political dimensions of the network roll-out.
THE man charged with driving the federal government’s national broadband network is clearly practised at batting away questions about who will get what and when.
In Perth this week to address a business audience, NBN Co CEO Mike Quigley was giving nothing away that his company had not considered very carefully or already put into the public domain.
But those were the issues of most interest; why were certain towns missing out on fibre? How much of the network would be rolled-out before the next federal election? Could the network’s rollout happen more quickly?
With a federal government unpopular in the polls and questions over the cost of the $40 billion strategy to give the whole Australian population high-speed broadband, mainly with fibre, just where the NBN would be in place over each year until 2020 is highly politicised.
For businesses, especially, when it comes to investment and planning, knowing when the NBN might arrive in a period spanning nine years may be vital to the decisions they make.
Just as important to some is whether a region, town or suburb benefits from the fibre network, or is among the 7 per cent destined to receive wireless service or satellite coverage.
Of course, Mr Quigley’s stance is not just that of a savvy pseudo public servant avoiding playing with political dynamite; there are clearly cases where answers are unclear even to NBN Co as policy or reality force it to alter plans.
For instance, Mr Quigley said the federal government’s policy to favour regional areas where current internet access was poor could mean that areas on the edge of towns or cities, like those outside Geraldton, may receive NBN coverage earlier than if they had to wait for the fibre.
“We think there’ll be some pressure on us to move that wireless service in (to urban areas) until the fibre is built and we move it (the wireless) back out again,” he said.
The same adaption is occurring due the government’s requirement to provide a wholesale fibre service to any major new residential development – something Telstra would have done in the past with copper and, at times, developers themselves did with cable.
That has meant the NBN has sped-up the development of what it calls its transit network, a system of looped lines that connect the major centres. The north-west town of Newman is benefitting from that – no doubt due to the state government’s stimulated residential development taking place under the Pilbara Cities policy.
Mr Quigley said early construction in such remote places came at great expense because NBN had to link that isolated piece of the network to the rest of Australia without its main network in place.
He said NBN Co had 209 developer applications from WA and signed 113 developer agreements. The cities of Rockingham, Wanneroo and Armadale represented one third of that construction.
The first of these to come online is in the new Broome North development.
Speaking at an Australian Information Industry Association luncheon, Mr Quigley was adamant that the company did not lobby and avoided being lobbied. He said NBN Co’s planners were actively discouraged from knowing where electoral boundaries lay as they made decisions on where the network would go based on technology issues and stated government policy.
“We just simply don’t want to know, it is safer that way,” Mr Quigley told the luncheon audience.
“The software spits out the rollout.”
“We have not tried to calculate where we will be by the next election; I have no idea by the way when the next election will be.”
Nevertheless, there is some information available on the planned WA roll-out, with several suburbs and regions destined to have the network in the coming months. It has been announced that work in Victoria Park and Mandurah has started already, with part of urban Geraldton due next month. Next year, Applecross can expect building to start in February, Meadow Springs and Pinjarra in April and South Perth in May.
Furthermore, Mr Quigley said that by next January NBN Co planned to have an indicative three-year roll-out plan, which would be updated annually.
“People will be getting, as soon as we can, an idea of where we’ll be going,” he said.