It’s believed that 49 new estates across Victoria’s metropolitan and regional areas with another 42 estates in New South Wales and 20 in Queensland, will now have new fibre broadband services installed free-of-charge over the coming months and well ahead of schedule.

In Victoria alone, the revised December increase means that 4636 premises have now been touted in the NBN Co Greenfield construction plans which is well up from the initial target of 1780 premises.

Read more at theage.com.au: Victoria’s new estates win in NBN rollout

Buying a house, or building a new house for that matter, can be an exciting venture and at the same time, a pain in the right old bleeding if you haven’t prepared enough. This is not to mention the potential headache around broadband availability options? Did you ever stop to consider what type of broadband provisioning will be, or is, available to you in this respective area? There are also many broadband obstacles to be aware of when moving into a new greenfield estate, such as limited technology types, delays and worst case scenario, no broadband option at all (with the exception of slow satellite).

Sol Trujillo’s (ex Telstra CEO) last parting shot at Australia suggested that our country is a couple of years behind the broadband eight ball, especially when compared to other developed countries, and this is almost made evident with the upcoming new National Broadband Network, or should I say, the time it’s taken Australia to get this far. After all, we don’t want to implement a new technology that will be outdated by the time it’s fully operational, nor do we want to wait 6 or 7 years to be able to use it!

First of all we had a Liberal Federal Government that talked about updating broadband in Australia, but sat on their butt for a few years while bickering with Telstra and did nothing. Then we had a new Labor Government that proposed a Fibre to the Node NBN model ‘hooray’… which failed after, ‘they say’, was a lack of feasibility within all the proponent’s submissions. Then, there was the big announcement, a very bold vision that is meant to propel Australia to the top of the Broadband list, a National ‘Fibre to the Premises’ model which will take 8 years to build and have speed upwards of 100Mbps that will reach 90% of Australian homes.

How many years has it taken??? How much longer will we have to wait??? It appears that many of us will have to wait longer although for some of us, things may be taking shape, although it still could be quite some time away yet. Sure it’s frustrating not to know if your new residence is eligible to receive ADSL, ADSL2+, Cable or Wireless Broadband let alone Fibre, but all is lost though as the Australian Government has commenced a process to make the provisioning of fibre broadband technology ’mandatory’ to all new greenfield residential estate developments as from 1st July 2010.

This is great news for anyone thinking of building a home in these areas in the short term. At least your new home will be ‘future proofed’ for fibre. What’s more, it’s also been stated that fibre-to-the-home technology already exists in more than 120 greenfield estates which translates to approximately 150,000 homes. The problem is the lack of information for identifying these areas and who and where to go to find out more? I’d recommend contacting the respective council and estate developer to find out further information on broadband options and fibre provisioning and hope that the FTTP rollout will backhaul these estates first.

Fibre in greenfield estates
As part of its National Broadband Network initiative, the Government has announced that the use of fibre optic technology will be required in greenfield estates.

Given the superior properties of fibre optic networks, it would be counter‑productive to have homes built in new developments with the latest building technology but connected by antiquated copper wires. Greenfield estates across Australia will therefore be required to use fibre optic infrastructure to the home and workplace.

The Government has released a stakeholder consultation paper on the implementation of its fibre in greenfields initiative. Submissions are due by 5:00pm (AEST) Friday 12 June 2009.
‘Caption taken from dbcde.gov.au’