The Future of Broadband - in Tasmania

Tasmania is leading Australia's ambitious broadband plan to wire more than 90 percent of the nation's homes with high-speed fiber optics.

The first three communities in Tasmania started getting fiber-to-the-home technology last month, with data speeds starting at 100 megabits per second, or 20 times faster than typical broadband speeds today. By 2013, Tasmania plans to have the hyper-speed broadband available to nearly all its 500,000 citizens -- and the government is installing it without charging the users. The plan is for the rollout to be completed throughout Australia five to seven years. Larry Smarr, a director of California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, calls the Australian policy "one of the most interesting experiments in the world." The Australian government, according to Mr. Smarr, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, sees the "importance of broadband as part of a nation-building exercise, unlike this country."