Australia's Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd has announced that Australia is going to get a new nationwide broadband infrastructure hitting speeds of up to 100Mbit provide by a national broadband network corporation, in which the government will be the major owner.

The good news is that the network will be operated independently from the current network operators in Australia and it will be a fibre-to-the-premise network (FTTx) - which should allow for higher speeds in the future - and will reach 90 percent of Australian homes. The remaining 10 percent will get alternative broadband connections via unspecified wireless or satellite technology which is said to hit speeds of up to 12Mbit. It's also said that the new network will bring with it up to 37,000 new job opportunities during the peak of the construction.

It was initially thought that a local network operator was going to win the bid to build the new network, but the government wasn't happy with any of the bids and has as such decided to do things on its own. The not so good news is that the project is expected to take eight years to finish and there's that small sum of AU$43 billion (€23/£20.9/US$30.7 billion) which isn't exactly pocket change. It's also thought that Telstar, Australia's previously government owned phone company, is going to try to cause delays by legal action, as they stand to lose out the most on this new high-speed network, but the government has said it will change legislation to prevent Telstra to cause delays.

The construction is said to kick off in Tasmania as early as by the middle of this year and then move on to other parts of the country. Hopefully this will lead to cheaper and faster broadband for everyone in Australia, as well as a removal of bandwidth caps which is plaguing the nation.

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