Australians Refuse to Give NBN Permission to Dig Trenches

WASHINGTON August 2, 2010- This month the Australian government began to implement its National Broadband Network but they have faced some minor opposition. In the state of Tasmania nearly half of the residents and businesses have yet to give permission to the government to install fiber connections

WASHINGTON, August 2, 2010 – This month, the Australian government began to implement its National Broadband Network but it has faced some minor opposition. In Tasmania, nearly half of the residents and businesses have yet to give permission to the government to install fiber connections.

Map of Australia highlighting the location of ...

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The installation of the fiber is free for all residents and businesses, but requires the owners to consent to the digging of the trenches. Those residents who refuse to have the trenches installed will then have to pay for the trenches to be dug when the copper network is disabled. The NBN plans to disable the nations copper based connection in the next eight years and the new fiber network will become the nation’s telecommunications backbone.

NBN Chief Executive Officer Mike Quigley said, “We do not want anyone within the First Release Sites to miss out on the opportunity to take their first step into a high speed future. When the network goes live people with the installed fiber optic cable will be able to choose a service from retail service providers and connect their premises to the National Broadband Network.”

The NBN network will provide 93 percent of the public speeds of 100 megabit per second down with the remaining 7 percent getting speeds of 12 mbps.