John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister announced a $2 billion plan on Monday to provide fast and affordable broadband service for the entire country.

The Sydney Morning Herald says Optus, one of the largest telcos in Australia has been awarded the contract to build a broadband network in the bush, in association with Elders finance company.  The joint venture has become known as OPEL and will contribute nearly $900 million to the project with the objective of reaching broadband speeds of 12Mbps by 2009.

“What we have announced today is a plan that will deliver to 99 percent of the Australian population very fast and affordable broadband in just two years’ time,” said the Prime Minister.

The network is being constructed with scalability in mind, the eventual hope is that speeds of up to 50 to 70Mbps will be reached.  Part of the network will be fiber optic and part of the network, mainly for the bush areas will be standard copper cable.

This is where the plan has been called into question.  While the larger cities have been targeted for the faster speeds, the bush areas have not.  Rural areas will get broadband but it will not be as fast as broadband available in cities.  It makes sense, provided that those in the rural areas do not have to pay the same price, or more, for slower service.

Howard added, “We’ll always be catching up, always, because we are 20 million people in a country (the size) of the United States without Alaska.”

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 10:00 am under Internet, Technology.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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