Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

The government will be looking at ways the impact of any aerial cabling can be minimised. Given that Senator Minchin has referred to Tasmania, I note comments from Dr Jonathan Spring, who is involved in the FTTP pilot in Tasmania with TasCOLT and who said on 3 June 2009:

In the TasCOLT project we rolled it out as an aerial cable deployment. It's a very attractive way of doing in comparison to the way cable TV was laid out, because the fibre cable is very much smaller than the existing cable that people might be aware of from Optus and Telstra.

Let us be clear. Senator Minchin is attempting to hug a piece of HFC cable. He is desperate to have a debate about cable the size of HFC. Perhaps if he went and got a briefing he would begin to understand that in actual fact what is available today for the fibre-optic rollout is considerably smaller than that. (Time expired)