The $5.2m project that will see around 250 customers at Julia Creek move from an nbn Sky Muster satellite service to the much faster Fibre to the Premises is getting underway.
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Nbn Local Queensland head Kylie Lindsay said they were surveying the community at present and construction would start in September.
She said it was important that people were able to get the work done when crews were on ground then, or ordering a service down the track would mean a delay while a truck was found and moved in from elsewhere.
"What we're really trying to encourage people to do is, when they're in town and rolling it out, we want people to be able to get the network termination box put on their house at the same time," she said. "That just means that when they order the service, it's ready to go."
Julia Creek is the only town on the Flinders Highway that will have FTTP, thanks to the federal government-funded Regional Connectivity Program, which Ms Lindsay described as a gamechanger.
"It's telehealth, it's education, it's bodycam footage for police, it's ambulance, fire brigades being able to do the online training they need to do," she said.
"People want to have connectivity when they move to places - you're not going to move your family out here if you can't keep in contact with the rest of the world.
"We see it all over Queensland, without that good connectivity, towns just can't attract people.
"If you don't attract families, you won't have the teachers, and so on."
Nbn's new Sky Muster Plus premium delivers speeds of up to 100 megabits per second, compared to the gigabyte per second that's delivered by fibre, which is 10 times faster.
Satellite also has latency issues.
Ms Lindsay said that once the nbn service became available in Julia Creek, Telstra would be switching off its copper service 18 months later.
"So if people want to maintain a landline they need to move across to nbn," she said.
The project is valued at $5,273,257 and is being funded by the federal government, the McKinlay Shire Council and nbn.
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Sally Gall
Based at Blackall, CW Qld, where I've raised a family, run Merino sheep and beef cattle, and helped develop a region - its history, tourism, education and communications. Get in touch at 0427 575 955 if you've got a story idea for me.
Based at Blackall, CW Qld, where I've raised a family, run Merino sheep and beef cattle, and helped develop a region - its history, tourism, education and communications. Get in touch at 0427 575 955 if you've got a story idea for me.
