Queensland council plans own optical fibre network

In a probably-inevitable outcome of the Australian government's mandated multi-technology model for the National Broadband Network, a Queensland city wants to go it alone and install its own fibre-to-the-premises network.

The plans so far are limited: Rockhampton's local newspaper, The Morning Bulletin reported last week that the city's council intends to pull fibre along Quay Street.

Mayor Margaret Strelow told the newspaper the council was disappointed that the original plan for the city to get fibre-to-the-premises had been replaced by fibre-to-the-node.

Vulture South reckons it's likely other councils will be weighing up the same considerations – and we're not certain it's a good idea.

The idea of council-owned broadband infrastructure has been floated many times in Australia over the years: the city of Albury put a lot of effort into a WIMAX network in the first half of the 2000s; a local broadband provider was mooted for the NSW inland city of Orange.

Most notorious, perhaps, was Brisbane City's $100 million plan to run fibre through the city's sewers, a project which collapsed in 2011.

So it's reasonable to be concerned that such projects have a less-than-stellar history in Australia – but there are other concerns worth raising.

Any council that decides to build a fibre network also has to handle the difficult task of integration with the NBN's systems, so that RSPs can sign their NBN customers onto the infrastructure.

It will also assume the administrative burden of acquiring and reporting against a telecommunications carrier license.

Set against the risks of failure, there's the risk of success. If it, and other local governments, learn from the past, there could be a widespread fracturing of the NBN around regional cities that are big enough to pull some fibre and smart enough to make it succeed.

That's a challenge for nbn^TM, the company building the network: it will then have to decide whether it overbuilds municipal broadband networks with its own fibre, or sticks to a FTTN rollout whose viability may be undermined by local fibre in the hope that the local initiative fails.

The federal government, on the other hand, can probably be expected to be on the side of the councils. Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has repeatedly stated his support for infrastructure-based competition, and can hardly be expected to send in the country's telco regulators to block such projects. ®