Construction of the telecommunication infrastructures required in the full roll out of the National Broadband Network (NBN) is now in full swing, with NBN Co. announcing on Tuesday that initial works are set to commence on Geraldton, Western Australia on October

According to NBN Co. chief executive Mike Quigley, the Western Australia construction leg has been awarded to Lend Lease and Service Stream and in the following month, workers will start laying down cables at Victoria Park in the same state.

Also in November, NBN construction will start in South Morang and Bacchus Marsh, both in Victoria and then another part of WA will get a taste of the NBN project as workers will be deployed to Mandurah by December.

By the first quarter of 2011, Quigley said that the NBN would have reached Brunswick while New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT constructions will be handled by Silcar, which won the $1.1 billion contract for the project.

Along with the planned design and construction works in the Northern Territory and South Australia, which Quigley said will be made known within the next few weeks, the NBN construction activities in all states and territories mentioned will cover some 60 percent of the overall project.

That amount of work would be undertaken over the next two years, according to the NBN Co. head, with many contractors based on the targeted regions set to benefit from the multi-billion nationwide internet project.

The whole NBN work for each site, according to NBN Co. construction head Dan Flemming, involves a two-staged, first of which is preliminary and design planning that require five months to complete and second, the actual construction activities that need at least seven months to complete.

Overall, at least one year is the waiting period before a site will be connected once the construction project has begun, which pretty much characterise the 'jigsaw approach' adopted by NBN Co. in implementing the roll out, Flemming said.

The central objective of all the construction projects revealed by NBN Co., Quigley said, is concentrated on the initiative's fibre deployment that will all be anchored on the 12-month timetable for each site.

"That will show all the places we'll be starting in the next 12 months. What we will do some time after that is to give a three-year indicative plan. The 12-month plan will be the plan; the three-year plan will be the indicative plan. We will be updating on a rolling basis, and we expect to update on a quarterly basis," ZDNet Australia quoted Quigley as saying.

He also admitted that NBN's fibre deployment partly hinges on Telstra, shareholders of which are scheduled to vote on the $11 billion deal between the government and the giant telco come October.

In the event that Telstra investors would thumb down the deal, which would allow NBN Co. to lease nationally-deployed pits and ducts owned by the telco, Quigley gave assurance that "we have a degree of flexibility in any construction contracts we let, and we try and think of all of those contingencies."