Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you to Senator Lundy for the question. The technology that the government has adopted in its Australia Connect package and in the rollout of the new network will reach people that the Labor Party will simply forget. The rural and regional Australians who will be excluded from the Labor Party’s ‘fraudband’ will be covered by this new technology. The OPEL network will use the best mix of technologies. It will use ADSL2+ in the more densely populated urban fringes and WiMAX technology to fill black spots in the ADSL2+ coverage and in the less densely populated regional areas. I am glad that Senator Lundy brought up Optus-Elders’s claim, because I happen to have here what Mr Les Wozniczka, CEO of Futuris, which is the owners of Elders, said this morning:

The network has been designed from the ground up to meet all the needs of users in rural and regional Australia. The government funds will be deployed in a mixture of fibre. In fact, 80 per cent of the funds will be going into improving backhaul roots, where there has been major congestion, and to address some issues of monopoly pricing there. It is going into WiMAX technologies and it is going into ADSL2+. The technology will deliver a performance that will be comparable to metropolitan centres.

He continued:

It is scaleable—