Government names 17 broadband SIPs

The federal government has selected 17 statutory infrastructure providers that will act as the designated providers of wholesale broadband in a combined 1592 locations across Australia.

The 17 providers had been contracted by developers over the past 15 years to supply broadband services to premises in their developments prior to the nbn rollout or in place of the nbn.

Under the legislation, NBN Co is the default statutory infrastructure for all of Australia, but developers can elect to reach arrangements with alternative providers for greenfield developments.

Statutory infrastructure providers must meet certain minimum standards, such as the provision of a service capable of supporting peak download speeds of 25 Mbps and upload speeds of 5 Mbps. At a minimum, services must also support telephony.

Other standards can include maximum timeframes for the connection and repair of wholesale services, as well as potential benchmarks related to network performance and reliability.

The 17 new providers are Advatel Wireless, CipherTel, CNTCorp, CommSol, Fibre Asset Management, Frontier Networks, Interphone, LBN Co, Lynham Networks, OMNIconnect, OPENetworks, OptiComm, PIPE Networks, Real World Networks, Reddenet, Telair Holdings and TransACT.

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