It’s the fibre network that will power everything from small businesses selling to their local neighbourhood, through to cutting-edge Australian innovators creating their businesses in the metaverse.
Using our special fibre-laying dozers and a lot of local know-how, today we’ve kicked off a program of work that will deliver real value to Australians and the economy for years to come.
It represents us breaking ground to actually deliver on the fibre network of the future. The one Australia deserves, that will give us the connectivity we need for the coming decades.
Breaking ground today is especially significant, considering we only announced the project a matter of weeks ago and we’re already rolling it out.
We saw a huge explosion of data being used during the pandemic, and that isn’t about to go away. We’re starting down an unprecedented digital future, and we want to enable Aussies to do business on the world-stage.
So over the next five years, we will be rolling out an upgrade to our existing national fibre network that will add a dual path of more than 20,000 route kilometres.
The network will be bolstered with high-speed, low-latency connectivity in mind to provide transmission rates over 650Gbps – six times the common rate of 100Gbps today. You can check out the full details on our announcement post from February.
The answer to this question is – all over Australia across the next five years.
As of today, we’ve kicked off construction in my home state – Western Australia. Between Bakers Hill and Northam, to be exact. We’ll soon also start ploughing on the opposite side of the country, in Orange, in NSW. We’ve chosen these initial locations to strategically test our new ‘dual plough’ tractors in diverse terrains.
It’s important that we do our initial installation projects in regional areas because this is not just an “intercapital” fibre network for cities.
What’s unique about our fibre project is it’s a dual cable network, on each fibre route. The first cable will be an express (intercapital) direct fibre network between capital cities, designed for our customers seeking point-to-point dark fibre over long distances. And the second cable will provide connectivity to regional locations and centres via break out and access points.
The network is also uniquely Australian, using a Sydney fibre provider’s cables that have been adapted to be more resilient to our sometimes harsh conditions.
It forms part of our ambitious T25 transformation goal for InfraCo, to deliver profitable growth and value by improving access, utilisation and scale of our infrastructure.
