After incumbent Telstra announced a rival plan, HyperOne founder Bevan Slattery is banking on industry support for the nationwide fibre network his business is creating.
Telstra said it would invest between $1.4 billion and $1.6 billion to lay around 20,000 kilometres of additional fibre to increase intercapital and regional capacity.
According to iTnews, the approach appears to be similar to that of HyperOne, which started last year to create a 20,000km fibre backbone for $1.5 billion.
“We anticipated Telstra’s desire to overbuild us,” Slattery wrote.
He stated that HyperOne would continue constructing its network, which began in December.
Slattery also anticipated that HyperOne would differentiate itself on competitive and regional grounds.
The HyperOne project has a strong regional focus to bring high-speed access to previously underserved and isolated areas of the country.
“There’s something greater going on here. Telstra will not do it. That allows for competition,” Slattery wrote.
“HyperOne is about bringing competitive backhaul to rural areas that have had some of the costliest backhauls in the industrialised world for decades.”
Slattery went on to say that HyperOne wanted to “enable mobile operators to extend coverage to more and more Australians,” as well as “provide network operators and hyper scalers with an opportunity to move on from legacy networks that do not scale physically or economically in line with their needs.”
He said that building two national backhaul networks would pit “innovation versus incumbency.”
“I hope the industry will support us in our goal – because it comes from a place of helping people and the digital future of our nation,” Slattery wrote.