By Lucy Battersby
Melbourne suburbs of Footscray, Keysborough and Karingal will be connected to the government's national broadband network next year, NBN Co announced this morning.
About 25,200 premises in these suburbs will be connected to the new fibre-optic network, which can provide broadband speeds of 100 megabits per second and will be upgraded for faster speeds in years to come.
NBN Co has already installed fibre-optics in a small patch of Brunswick and will expand the roll out to the rest of the suburb. NBN Co has started constructing its network in South Morang and Bacchus Marsh in Melbourne's outer-west. It previously announced construction would start within twelve months in Ballarat, Tullamarine, Frankston and Melton. It estimates services will be available in these sites about 12 months after construction starts.
"The rollout footprint in Victoria will continue to increase as we expand out from those areas where construction work is already taking place," NBN Co's chief operations officer Ralph Steffans said.
Today's announcement was NBN Co's first quarterly rollout update. It plans to release a new update every three months. The national broadband network is a government-funded infrastructure project design to replace Telstra's ageing copper telephone network with a new fibre-optic network. It will cost about $36 billion to build and NBN Co will also pay Telstra about $14 billion to use its infrastructure and transfer copper-line customers to NBN Co.
NBN Co will own and maintain the network and sell services directly to companies, which then provide retail broadband services. The full roll out is expected to take 10 years.
About 93 per cent of premises in Australia will be connected by fibre-optic cable, 4 per cent by fixed-4G wireless and the remaining 3 per cent by satellite. The satellite services are already avaialable to remote premises on an interim service. The copper telephone line will remain connected to households served by wireless and internet services.
NBN Co added the suburb of Corrimal, north of Wollongong in NSW, to the roll out schedule. Construction to connect 8200 premises to the network will start later this year.
NBN Co has already connected 18, 200 premises across Australia , 2574 are using NBN Co fibre. Construction is underway at a further 121,500 , and today's announcement means construction will start at 618,400 premises within a year.
A total of 5200 premises are using NBN Co services over fixed and satellite connections.
lbattersby@theage.com.au