Axia NetMedia eyes NBN role with Sydney office

Axia NetMedia has established a set up a team of four staff in Sydney specifically to identify opportunities to participate in the national broadband network.

Chief executive Art Price told iTnews the team - which encompassed technical, customer-facing, and financial skillsets - was already "meeting with key industry players".

Price declined to reveal how much Axia was investing in its bid to secure NBN planning work.

"Our key investment is in people," Price said. "It's a case of ‘here's a Government challenge', how can we help them approach it?"

Axia was one of the original bidders in the collapsed NBN request for proposals (RFP) process.

It did not submit a proposal to deploy a fibre-to-the-node network. Rather, Axia proposed a mirror of the next generation network it built in Alberta, Canada, consisting of a community interconnect fibre network, which could be used as a foundation for deploying fibre-to-the-premises.

Axia's proposal appeared to have changed little since the failed RFP, as Price presented the same model to the Senate Select Committee on the NBN in Sydney today.

iTnews reported in May that "certain elements" of the proposal it had submitted as part of the RFP could be extracted and used in the Government's proposed $43 billion NBN.

Price told the Committee today that under Axia's model, a community interconnect grid could be established within three years at a cost of between $5 and $7 billion.

The subsequent FTTP rollout would consume between two-thirds and three-quarters of the NBN capital.

But even so, Price said he anticipated that should cost "in the range of $20 billion".

"We'd expect an NBN [under this model] to cost $27 billion with no contingencies," Price said.

He blamed politicisation of the project for the larger $43 billion figure that has been quoted.

Axia was not the only failed RFP bidder to be circling the ‘new new NBN'.

Another of the failed bidders, Acacia, recently made headlines again after its leader, former Telstra executive Doug Campbell, was appointed to head up the Tasmanian NBN company.