Government Decides To Build The NBN Themselves

So, it looks like we might actually get that NBN after all, despite it seeming like the neverending stall-ey (boom-tish). K-Rudd this morning announced that all five tenders from the private sector to build the NBN were a load of crap, so he, Conroy and his entire Labor Government posse has decided to build the damn thing themselves (with some help from the private sector).They’re creating a company, of which they’ll be the majority shareholder, to look after the network’s construction. All up, they’re expecting to invest up to $43 billion over the next eight years to finance the network.

On a positive note, the network will now be a 100Mbps Fibre-To-The-Home network, rather than the Fibre-To-The-Node that has been discussed throughout the tender process. That means faster and better connection for all of us, which is a great thing. Well, 90 per cent of us anyway – if you’re in that last 10 percent, you’ll get wireless or satellite capped at about 12Mbps.

And even though there’s speculation that Telstra will try and take the Government to court to try and delay or even stop the network (after all, they’re set to lose their stranglehold over the national telecommunications infrastructure, which means losing dollars), K-Rudd has stated that they’ll change legistaltion to stop the Telco from threatening the NBN’s success.

Building the network is expected to commence down in Tassie in July, with no word on when the rest of the country might be getting its fast network speed on. There’s also no mention of the pricing for end consumers either, so how much this network is going to cost you will be something we’ll be keeping a close eye on over the upcoming months.