NBN Co Blog

There are three little words that lots of Australian waiting for high speed broadband want to hear...

Ready. For. Service.

Ready for a service over the National Broadband Network that is.

And that is what the people of Toowoomba heard, more often than not, when visiting the NBN Co truck at the Heritage Royal Show recently.

Residents of Toowoomba and many of the surrounding areas are among the lucky Australians who can connect to the NBN right now.

There are both Fibre and Fixed Wireless services currently active in the region, which resulted in many excited residents jumping onboard the truck to find out more.

While keen to get a connection, many truck visitors were unsure of how to go about it.

So let's break it down.

Getting connected to the NBN is as easy as 1, 2, 3:

1. Check NBN Co's interactive map to see if the NBN is available in your area.
2. If the NBN is available in your area, simply look through the list of phone and internet service providers, and give your preferred provider a call to select the right option for you.
3. Your service provider will arrange a time for the NBN Co equipment to be installed and your services activated (a standard installation will be free of charge).

The sun-kissed concrete rumbles. Eyes wide with excitement turn towards the sky. The NBN Co Discovery Truck shudders as an F-22 Raptor roars overhead.

It's not easy to make a 32 tonne truck shudder, but it did at the recent 2013 Australian International Airshow at Avalon in Victoria.

Millions of years ago, dinosaurs ruled the earth until their historic extinction at the end of the Mesozoic era.

Personally, I'm thrilled I don't share the sidewalk with a Tyrannosaurus Rex but did you know that several species of birds survived the extinction event 65 million years ago, and modern birds today carry on the dinosaur lineage?

This adds a whole new element to the birds that perch on the railing of the NBN Co Discovery Truck, tweeting dangerously as we discuss the science of optical fibre inside.

You might be wondering why I am writing about dinosaurs - it's because of some really awesome new ways museums are bringing dinosaurs and palaeontology to life for young students via high-speed broadband.

When the NBN Co Discovery Truck pulled into Darling Harbour in Sydney for CeBIT, we knew it would be one of the more popular exhibits, but we had no idea just how popular!

We had groups of 15 or more people coming through the truck every two minutes for almost three days solid to see the NBN equipment, learn about the rollout plans and ask their curliest questions.

One of the interesting questions asked by several visitors was whether the NBN has resilience (or, in telecommunications jargon, "redundancy") built in to deal with parts of the network being damaged - for example, if someone ploughs through a high capacity fibre optic cable on their tractor by mistake.

The NBN Co Discovery Truck recently visited Kiama on the south coast of NSW where some communities are already connected to the NBN via fibre optic cable.

We were blown away by some of the changes taking place in the local community.