The News on the 2 March 2010 regarding the First Release sites (download) has been seen as some that we have lost our bid to be one of the early adopters. Our aims are twofold: 1) to campaign for the Eastern Regional Corridor to be one of the Early Adopters of the NBN and 2) to ensure our region is NBN ready for whenever it arrives.

Regarding the First Release, we have had unsolicited assurances from Mike Kaiser, the NBN Co's principal for government relations and external affairs, that:

"The Company’s motivation for this exercise is purely to test our design and construction methodologies and take those learnings and apply them to the national volume roll out when that occurs down the track. The sites were chosen for their ability to test various geographical, utility and housing features along with the organisation’s capacity to operate in a number of regions simultaneously. These are not the criteria which will dictate the volume roll out when that commences."

Hence, the First Release trail sites (which are only suburbs and not a whole town) do not impact the choice of the regions that will be selected when the volume roll out occurs. Obviously, it will not be efficient to roll the NBN out on a suburb by suburb bases - especially when you consider the size of Australia. Each of the five trial sites only cover between 1000 - 3000 properties. Just between Brisbane and Sydney alone the population is around 2 Million so that's possibly a 1000 times bigger than a trial site. 

Early Adoption is not just about who is first but being in the top half, and ideally the top half of that, so we don't get left till last when, as this site show, the region has so much to offer. 

Professor Peter Croll