Internode unveils Fibre to the Home plans.
When it comes to internet connections, Australia is often behind the times. Much of the country still awaits decent ADSL2+ support, but our dispersed population doesn’t help matters. So, it may come as a surprise that Australia is seeing some movement in the Fibre to the Home (FTTH) front – and not from Telstra. Internode today announces it is launching support for residential FTTH connections.
The ISP is teaming up with telecommunications specialist Opticomm, who lays down FTTH networks in new housing estates. As such, Internode says it will deliver “Australia’s fastest residential broadband services at greenfield developments”, and this competes directly with Telstra’s Velocity service which runs on the same Opticomm networks.
“We think it’s a very exciting initiative, demonstrating that in the real world, the future for residential broadband is clearly Fibre to the Home – and Internode is thrilled to be a part of making it happen – today,” proclaims Internode’s managing director, Simon Hackett.
In terms of speeds, Internode will offer three categories – 25Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up, 50Mb/s down and 2Mb/s up, and a chunky 100Mb/s down and 5Mb/s up for the heavy users. The plans, which you can view here [PDF], will start at $49.95 per month for a 25Mb/s connection with a 5GB shaped monthly download quota. The most expensive plan sports a 100Mb/s pipe with a 100GB quota and will set you back $184.95. Uploads are not counted on any of the plans, quite unlike competitor Telstra’s Velocity plans which offer significantly less bang for buck.
As an opponent of the government’s National Broadband Network (NBN) initiative, it’s no surprise we see Internode make this announcement now, as the government remains optimistic in hopes of signing a contract for the roll-out by next month. Hackett has previously stated to BNET Australia that “we might get a decision to build a network by 2010 to build a network by 2015, that will be completely obsolete by 2020. That’s just madness.”
Sure to take another stab at it today, Hackett says “Our testing shows that Internode Home Fibre service is working extremely well, delivering outcomes at up to eight times faster than the National Broadband Network target speed of 12 Mbps. NBN speeds stopped being the future quite some time ago. Significantly, FTTH is scalable in the future to speeds far greater than that again.”
Competition this early on is a pleasant surprise, even though it only affects a small minority for now. You can find out more about Internode’s new residential fibre services right here.
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