ISPs to pay $300 per connection in Tassie NBN stage one

iPrimus, iiNet and Internode will pay $300 per premises connected to NBN Co as part of the Tasmanian stage one rollout of the national broadband network (NBN).

The pricing will be set until July next year and apply to the premises in Smithton, Scottsdale and Midway Point.

The news was revealed by NBN Co chief executive, Mike Quigley at a Senate Estimates hearing on the NBN.

“We haven’t made that public but it is no great secret,” Quigley said. “This is a stage one, for first implementation in Tasmania for a limited number of premises and for that stage one activity we agreed an interim price for a fixed period of time, to help with the… costs of these retail service providers who are cooperating with us in the very first instance of this type of service. So it is a perfectly natural and commercial thing to do and I wouldn’t have any hesitation as a commercial entity.”

Quigley said a connection fee of $300 per household will be charged to retail service providers, which will then move to national pricing in July next year.

“They will move onto the overall national pricing which will be part of our special access undertaking with the ACCC in July of next year,” Quigley said. “So for a limited period of time and a limited number of premises we are charging them just the connection fee.”

The NBN Implementation Study suggested wholesale prices could sit at $25 to $30 a month for a basic broadband service at 20Mbps and $30 to $35 per month for basic broadband 20Mbps plus voice service.

The Tasmania stage one price is at the lower end of this forecast at $25 a month if you assume a 12 month period from 1 July.

iPrimus has already revealed its first pricing plans for the NBN, beginning at $39.95 for 25Mbps downstream speeds and 15GB of data quota. The most expensive plan is currently at $139 per month, with 100Mbps speeds and 300GB of data quota. It also said residential customers will receive committed upstream speeds of two to eight megabits per second (Mbps) on the iPrimus network.

The upstream speeds will be tiered in line with downstream. Users on the 25Mbps line will be able to upload at 2Mbps, 50Mbps users will get 4Mbps upstream while those on the full-speed, 100Mbps package will be able to upload at 8Mbps. In March, the Federal Government announced the third stage of funding for NBN Tasmania, which will see a further $100 million in funding used to roll out high speed broadband to 90,000 premises in Hobart, Launceston, Devonport and Burnie.

As part of stage three, 40,000 premises in Hobart, 30,000 in Launceston and 10,000 in each of Burnie and Devonport will gain be connected to the NBN. The first stage of the rollout of the NBN in Tasmania began in July last year with the release of an open competitive tender for fibre optic cable by Aurora Energy.

Stage Two, announced in October 2009, saw Sorell, Deloraine, George Town, St Helens, Triabunna, Kingston Beach, and South Hobart added to the network. The stage also saw the addition of backbone optic fibre transmission links on the East Coast, to Kingston and to a new industrial hub being developed at Westbury.

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