Dean Calvert, with Brittany and Reece at home in Athelstone, South Australia. Picture: Alice Prokopec Source: The Australian
WIRING up a house to make best use of the National Broadband Network could cost up to $400 a room.
About 93 per cent of premises will have a fibre-optic cable connection provided some time in the next eight years under the $43 billion project.
Making maximum use of the NBN's high-speed broadband connection could prove expensive, especially when it comes to shunting large chunks of data from the optical network terminal where the NBN will be used in several rooms.
While wiring up a home to make best use of the NBN will cost households, the bill won't be anything like the $6000 a home figure bandied about by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy this week when he accused The Australian of mounting an NBN scare campaign.
Speaking on the ABC's Lateline program, Senator Conroy said there was a "myth that there's a $6000 cost to get the NBN into your home - all this rewiring, it's completely false".
"And The Australian are repeating it over and over again."
In an article published on August 20 about the costs of wiring a home to make best use of the NBN's high speeds, The Australian used an upper estimate of $3000 for rewiring costs.
A figure of $6000 was never mentioned, let alone being repeated in subsequent articles, as Senator Conroy has claimed.
Network experts and the federal government's own implementation study say wires rather than cheap wireless routers are the best solution for bandwidth-hungry applications like video.
While most people with broadband connections today use wireless routers to distribute bandwidth around the house, wireless won't handle jobs like streaming high-definition video, such as on the latest internet TV services, to multiple screens at once.
The federal government's NBN implementation study warns of the need to hardwire rooms for bandwidth-hungry applications like internet TV.
Customers who want IPTV services "would require Cat 6 cable connected between the optical network terminal and each set-top box for each television", the study says.
It goes on to say the length of cable required to carry bandwidth for each IPTV-equipped screen could range from 5m to more than 20m and take anywhere between 30 minutes and two hours for a skilled technician to install.
James Tinslay, chief executive of the National Electrical and Communications Association, whose members carry out home network installations, said the cost of installing cable to various rooms in a house would cost between $250 and $400 a port.
Mr Tinslay said it was much cheaper to install cable in a new home along with the electrical wiring, and this would cost between $100 and $150 a port.
"If you were building a house right now you would be crazy not to put a cable system in," he said. The combination of NBN speeds and multiple high-bandwidth applications operating at once pushed the need for cable in the home.
"We all use wireless at home to some extent but if you've got a four-bedroom home and you've got kids with Xboxes and other devices and streaming TV, the pipe has got to be a bit faster," Mr Tinslay said.
Adelaide resident Dean Calvert had his home wired up with cable in early 2008 during renovation work. Mr Calvert, who owns an IT firm, had been using a wireless network but found it lacked the grunt to carry video around his home. He installed the cable network to carry video and music stored on his own internal server and to future-proof his home for the NBN.
"Despite the fact we had a wireless network in the house, if you want to access digital media it's more efficient to port it over cable than wireless."
Having a network that was free from the interference that hurts wireless bandwidth, such as cordless phone and microwave oven radiation, was also an attraction, he said.
Mr Calvert said the cost of his network - an elaborate one with 20 connection points around the house installed by a professional cabler - was about $4000.
Mr Calvert said he hoped his home in the foothills of the Adelaide Hills was within the NBN fibre footprint.
His ADSL connection delivers just 3.5Mbps due to the 6km distance to the exchange.
"If the NBN gets as far as we are, I will just gobble it up," he said.
