Australians need continued investment in our network infrastructure to create true Tier 1 telco competition

One of the primary characteristics of Superloop's business since we were founded is our continuous investment in our network infrastructure.

This may seem unusual, in that the Superloop network remains one of the newest and fastest available to Australian business, RSPs and consumers. But that is part of what we see as our continued success.

It's certainly part of our continued commitment to the Australian business and retail telco sectors, to create opportunities for new connectivity and services.

The Superloop board has recently approved a new round of investment in our infrastructure, to create new levels of diverse fibre connections to a majority of the 121 NBN Points of interconnection (POIs) around Australia.

Superloop is already connected to all of these POIs. This investment is around adding new levels of redundancy and resilience to a large majority of these, including further afield from the metropolitan and CBD areas.

Investing in physically diverse fibre and redundancy removes single points of failure from the network, ensuring fast, reliable and secure delivery to meet the demands of existing customers, and organisations and individuals  seeking new levels of performance, capacity and resilience.

Creating these multiple and physically diverse fibre connections further increases the strength and robustness of the internet network the nation has been calling for.

The investment will result in the following changes:

What might this look like at a network level?

In Sydney, if our fibre between Chatswood and its primary data centre in Macquarie Park was cut/damaged - it would automatically reroute to its alternative path via St Leonards to the CBD with no customer impact.  

Likewise, in Melbourne, the southern area of Cheltenham can rely on its alternative path via Caulfield if its primary path is lost. And so on around the country.

This investment also extends to areas such as the central coast and south coast of NSW, to regional Victoria and Queensland, including as far north as Cairns, and in Western Australia as far north as Geraldton.

It builds on the original intent, which was to build the fastest, most reliable and secure network we could in the shortest amount of time, cost-effectively. These changes will allow  significantly higher customer numbers on the network across wholesale, enterprise and consumer segments.

Not all NBN networks are equal. Between the internet and the user, the reality is that there are any number of network connections. There are no half-measures once a network has dropped. Users simply see their screens go blank. Without the network, access to everything from our favourite streaming services to our essential commercial cloud services isn't possible.

And customers don't care who's at fault. Our responsibility therefore continues to be to focus on minimising the possibility of a loss of network connection under our control - network infrastructure we already have in place in the main metro centres, and now, added connectivity there, and further afield.

Adding capacity and resilience to the network we have (as can be seen in the table above, we're increasing our ability to provide hundreds of gigabits per second at mass scale in more locations) build connectivity confidence for companies, consumers and RSPs seeking a reliable, fast, modern, digital-first, automated, NBN network.

Superloop also continues to invest in operations and network infrastructure around a single IT stack, something that provides significant advantage, and possible because Superloop is not limited by historically old investments into systems.

The upshot of all of this investment, around capacity, resilience, flexibility, speed and automation, is that Superloop is increasingly a Tier 1 challenger, able to offer competitive alternatives in the Australian telco market.

We'll keep you updated on the progress over the coming months...