NBN rollout hits milestone in regional SA

The National Broadband Network rollout has hit a milestone in regional South Australia with the regional fixed line rollout now complete.

This means 140,000 premises in all regional towns beyond metropolitan and outer-metropolitan Adelaide are now rolled out and ready for service.

“Rolling out to regional and remote areas of South Australia has been NBN’s key priority,” said Mr Pasin.

“Before the NBN, there were too many areas of the State unable to access any broadband at all. It meant internet services like email, cloud-based business tools, web searches or entertainment sites that were easily accessible in metropolitan areas, were simply unavailable to regional residents.

“The Coalition Government said from the outset that the NBN was determined to bridge the digital divide between metropolitan and regional areas of Australia.

“In terms of the sequence of the rollout, we believed it was important to provide services to residents and businesses with no access, bad access or every expensive access to broadband services – which is why it was important to prioritise regional South Australia.

The rollout of the fixed wireless service – currently available to a further 58,000 premises across SA, will be ongoing until 2020 in order to provide coverage to an extra 14,000 premises in regional SA – more than half of which come on line this year.

There are now 86,553 of premises able to connect to the NBN in the electorate of Barker, a substantial increase from the just 794 of premises able to connect when the Coalition came into Government in 2013. The rollout in Barker is now more than 98 per cent complete.

“By 2020 Australia will be the only continent in the world that provides universal fast broadband coverage to every individual property via fixed line, fixed wireless and satellite technologies,” Mr Pasin said.

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