• Communications minister Michelle Rowland.
FEDERAL communications minister Michelle Rowland was in the Fremantle electorate this week with good news for around 7000 internet users; they’ll finally be able to get the download speeds they were originally promised.
It’s part of a $2.4 billion election promised from the Albanese government to help businesses and residents to transition from the clunky Fibre to the Node system and its aged copper wiring and onto super-speed Fibre to the Premises.
Once NBN Co stretched the optic fibre cabling along their street, residents in Fremantle, Beaconsfield, Bibra Lake, Coolbellup, Kardinya, Spearwood, Success and White Gum Valley will be able to order an upgrade through their service provider.
“Also announced today is that NBN Co is partnering with the City of Cockburn to establish a new Business Fibre Zone,” Ms Rowland told the Herald.
“This means that within this particular area, we’ve got some 1200 businesses and residents that will be able to enjoy what’s called Enterprise Ethernet, which is the top quality grade of fibre service. We’re looking at up to sort of 10 gigabits per second, which is really important.
“Data intensive businesses will really appreciate that.”
Ms Rowland says the Albanese government was also making the NBN satellite service, known as Skymaster, uncapped and unmetered, which affects part of Banjup in the south east of the electorate.
Fremantle MP Josh Wilson has been grinding his teeth about the electorate’s crappy internet for years, and says the old Skymaster rules were unbearable for families.
“The way Skymaster was working is that people had a fixed kind of data limit,” Mr Wilson said.
“And so you ended up with people borrowing the internet, like literally taking a laptop that might need an upgrade and driving a couple of hours to get to the edge of the city and use a friend’s WiFi in order to do a systems upgrade.”
He said some families also had to do rationing, where kids weren’t allowed to watch movies until mum and dad finished their business, and often had to go days without any access because their monthly limit had run out.
Ms Rowlands said the government was also at the “pointy end” of negotiating the deal between NBN Co and retailers. She said the Morrison government had proposed above-inflation rises which would have probably fallen foul of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, so she’d asked the sector to work constructively together to ensure any rise wouldn’t be so punishing for users.