Regional reseller said NBN plan better than Telstra's Next G proposal

Martin Aungle, corporate communications manager at Dimension Data said the reseller had a lot of regional broadband projects through healthcare and education sectors.

He said regional centres will benefit the most from a Government run broadband network.

 "It will also probably make it the reseller community competitive when it comes to bidding for broadband-based tenders in remote areas," said Aungle.

"At the moment carriers carry a lot of clout for these types of projects."

However Aungle told CRN it was too soon what the direct opportunities will be for resellers and carriers.

"Once the NBN is built there will be huge benefits for technology like video application," he said.

"Resellers and integrators playing in the space will see the benefits of working in a distributed fashion."

Paul Budde, telecommunications analyst of BuddeComm, said this will be one of the most ambitious infrastructure ever undertaken in Australia and will be the most ambitious Fibre-to-the Home network anywhere undertaken in the world.

"This network is not just for high-speed internet and enterainment but more importantly, for healthcare, education, smart grids, etc," he said.

"The nature of the investment further highlights this it is an open network and the infrastructure will be made available on a wholesale level.

"This makes it possible to deliver that infrastructure on a utilities' basis which, of course, is going to make access to the network very affordable to the end users."

According to Budde the government's proposal basically guarantees the investment money for the project and also indicates the use of the infrastructure for other sectors (healthcare, etc).

Healthcare will be able to independently provide e-health services to Australians over the network, without these people needing to have a paid subscription.

"So what is happening is that there won't be a gatekeeper involved who clips the ticket of everything what is happening over the network," he said.

"The accompanying regulatory documentation doesn't give Telstra any room to manoeuvre."