All five mainland NBN sites to go live by April
- 23 February, 2011 15:16
- Comments 3
NBN Co has announced that all five first release sites will be activated for trials by April. NBN Co is the company responsible for rolling out the Government’s National Broadband Network.
Armidale is the most advanced of the five mainland sites and Quigley reportedly told the audience at the Broadband and Beyond 2011 conference in Sydney it would be the first to get end-user customers.
“This is the place where we will probably make the connections to mainland customers, it is just simply the timing has worked out that way for a variety of reasons and… by the end of April we expect to have customers connected,” Computerworld reported.
The first five mainland sites with NBN Co rollouts are Armidale in NSW, Kiama in NSW, Willunga in SA, Townsville in QLD and Brunswick in Victoria.
An NBN Co spokesperson told ARN all five sites would have activated trial customers by the end of April via retail services providers (ISP). They also said Armidale had not been finalised as the first test customer.
“We’re 80 to 90 per cent complete with passive fibre construction averaged across the five sites,” the spokesperson said. “We’re looking at getting one or two test customers by the end of April.
“We’ll be adding more [end users] in the first weeks and months… we haven’t finalised who those retail service providers will be yet.”
Kiama and Armidale have also been slated for a $4 million e-health trial aimed at older Australians with chronic conditions. They’ll receive home telehealth vital stats monitoring and video consultations.
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Comments
Get on with it
Of course they are rushing to get these trial sites going by April. April will see the second anniversary of the NBN announcement. To date there are only 400-odd NBN connections. They desperately don't want that to be the headline.
If the desired outcome is 10,000,000 premises in eight years, shouldn't we be closer to 2,500,000 premises done at the two year mark?
NBNCo's 600 staff and 400 connections. What a joke.
Francis Young
Mr 'Get on with it', you have obviously never planned and executed a large project. The NBN construction spans a decade and every town in the country.
There are 6000 premises in Armidale and 80-90% are connected. Similar numbers in all the others except Brunswick (which has proven the idiocy of an opt-in model). Once the fibre is in the ground it will be lit (later this week in Armidale, in fact). These five sites will have paying customers in April and be in production in June.
And the teething issue with the gigabit speed customers in the Tasmania pilot were all fixed in January (as Senator Abetz learned to his chagrin on 22 Feb when he raised them in Senate Estimates). We are today getting a network that even South Korea is only now planning to upgrade to (it's current $70 billion FTTH network only delivers 100 Mbps speeds).
When you consider the procurement, logistics, scheduling, network management, billing systems, payroll, planning, corporate management, public liaison and everything else, the staff level of this national project seems quite modest, and its progress to date is impressive.
This is the second time you have posted this silly comment with a silly name.
Francis Young
Edit: to clarify, there are 6000 premises in the Armidale fibre footprint - this is only the northwest corner of the city, which is of course much bigger.
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