Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo announced this morning that the company has lodged its AU$5 million tender bond for the national fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) network.
The government's plan for bush WiMax coverage may well have hit a hurdle, after concerns over an ongoing court case with Telstra reportedly led to a delay in signing the contract with OPEL to build the network.
Communications Minister Helen Coonan has hit back at Telstra, accusing the telco of sour grapes, after it announced it had filed suit against her over its failed bid for some AU$1 billion of WiMax funding.
Telstra will disclose thousands of its execs' private e-mails in the ongoing legal scrap between the telco and the Federal Communications Minister.
The cost of connecting to Australia's forthcoming WiMax bush broadband will not be as expensive as some have suggested, according to OPEL, a joint venture between Elders and Optus, the company building the network.
Say what you will about Senator Stephen Conroy, but he is clearly not a man afraid of confrontation. Well, he'd better not be, because by killing off the OPEL WiMax project he has just set himself up for a battle with Telstra of Biblical proportions or a big meal of crow washed down with a $4.7 billion gift to SingTel Optus.
Post-election adrenaline surging through his veins, one of the first acts performed by new Communications Minister Stephen Conroy was to disband the expert panel that his predecessor Helen Coonan had appointed last June to evaluate tenders for fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) construction.
For no particular reason that I can discern, a 1979 Kenny Rogers song popped into my head as I was considering the ever more complex morass that is the national broadband network tender which Senator Stephen Conroy defended in his CeBIT keynote speech.
South Australia's Yorke Peninsula with just 11,780 people spread across 5,834 square kilometres, is known more for its rugged natural beauty than its technological prowess. But now that Internode has brought broadband to the entire peninsula, the area has become a very important part of Australia's telegeography.
With the OPEL bid cancelled and procedural questions dogging the FTTN bid, Australia is currently in something of a technological limbo.
WiMax, the controversial long range wireless broadband technology, is set to spread across rural Australia from next year -- but despite the outgoing Howard government's ambitious project, both fixed and mobile variants of the technology are already being deployed around the world.
When the government announced that Optus and Elders had won the bid to build Australia's bush broadband network, it provoked jeers and plaudits alike, but it was the ISPs' choice of WiMax as the bearer technology that has provoked the most furious storm of argument. Just how will the technology stand up to life in the bush?
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