NBN arrives in Darwin Lucy Battersby December 20, 2011 - 12:25PM
A 6000 kilometer government-funded fibre optic network across regional Australia was completed today, as the final connection was laid between Emerald and Darwin.
The fibre optic network was constructed by Leighton subsidiary NextGen Networks using $250 million from the federal government's Regional Backbone Blackspots Programme. It joins regional towns like Geraldton in Western Australia, Broken Hill in NSW and Mildura, Victoria to a pan-Australia network run by NextGen.
The RBBP was designed to build high speed broadband infrastructure to regional towns which had one, or no other, fibre optic connections back to capital cities. Known as 'backhaul', the high speed fibre optic connections are used by internet service providers to carry their customer's data back to company servers. Advertisement: Story continues below
The new network could make broadband services cheaper for people in regional areas by driving down backhaul prices.
NectGen will manage the network for NBN Co for several years as part of the deal, but the infrastructure belongs to the government. It won the tender for the project in 2009 and constructed the network using laborers from Vision Stream.
