ARLA/CLUSTER: Austrália opta pela Fibra Óptica ao invés do BPL

[João Gonçalves Costa]

The Australian Federal Government has announced its decision on 
Australias National Broadband Network. In a surprise move, instead of 
deploying a widely expected half-way-house fiber-to-the-node (FttN) 
solution from a consortium of companies, the Government is moving ahead 
with its own full-blown 100Mb/s fibre to the home rollout, (FttH). The 
reported $43 billion project will include a mix of government and 
private sector funding which may or may not include telecommunications 
companies. 

Telecommunications analyst Paul Budde states: "This is the most 
ambitious infrastructure ever undertaken in Australia and will be the 
most ambitious FttH network anywhere undertaken in the world. The 
Australian Government is one of the few governments who, in a holistic 
way, understand the importance of broadband across the various sectors. 
This network is not just for high-speed Internet and entertainment but, 
more importantly, for healthcare, education,
smart grids, etc". 

This is good news for Australian's in general, and also for Australian 
radio amateurs. Australia's largest telecommunications carrier, 
Telstra, was excluded from the original selection process on the 
grounds of submitting a non-compliant bid, however, as Telstra owns most of the 
copper cable in the ground, any fiber-to-the-node solution which did 
not include Telstra would have resulted in a variety of 'alternative' 
access technologies used to connect the `node' to customers premises. 
Although there may be many steps along the way, the predominant access 
technology in Australian cities will now be fiber, and in less 
populated areas will likely be wireless. 

This decision would appear to remove the possibility of widespread 
interference to radio communications from any network-wide adoption of 
BPL technology, but still leaves as a concern the possibility of 
interference from in-home use of BPL as an internal distribution 
technology. 

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The decision by Australia to opt away from BPL is likely a major blow 
to the world-wide implementation of this technology.  This is because 
other nations will look at Australia's decision to go fiber and based 
upon it reconsider any commitment to BPL.

Fonte: WIA News