Australia is set to leapfrog over the United States and Canada, declaring its intent to deliver fiber broadband service to the vast majority of its citizens within eight years.  The country embarked on a National Broadband Plan more than a year before the United States, declaring the current state of usage-limited, slow, expensive, and incomplete broadband coverage to be unacceptable.

Australia discarded an earlier plan to work with private providers to build the network when government officials faced opposition from private providers who did not want to lose control of the broadband market.  In a surprising decision last September, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced the government would commence construction of a fiber to the home network itself, excluding private providers from participation.

NBN Company, a government-owned entity, will construct the $43 billion network over eight years, delivering 100Mbps speeds on a fiber network.  The infrastructure will be designed for an easy upgrade to 1 Gigabit service as bandwidth demand intensifies.

A separate deal concluded today with Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company, will retire the nation’s copper wire landline network and cable systems, to be replaced by NBN fiber.

Up to 37,000 jobs will be created to build the network across the country, supplemented with wireless broadband for Australia’s most rural areas.

But some are complaining the network is too extravagant and expensive, adding their displeasure with the Rudd government’s strong-arming of Telstra to give up its network.

Opposition finance spokesman Andrew Robb said taxpayers would be on the hook for the project.

“It’ll come with a multi-billion dollar taxpayer debt that will have to be paid off over decades,” Robb said, adding if elected, the opposition promises to scrap the plan.

[flv width=”424″ height=”260″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Nine Network New National Broadband Plan 4-6-09.flv[/flv]

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd originally introduced his nationwide fiber network proposal in April 2009.  Channel Nine provides this roundup of the original announcement, media reaction, and a few insults from the opposition.  Just a day after the plan was introduced, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy warned Telstra to “back off,” referring to the company’s immediate lobbying effort to block the proposal.  (11 minutes)