NBN recruitment drive to create Australian jobs

A recruitment drive carried out by NBN Co. to employ workers to construct the national broadband network in Perth will lead to creation of jobs. Through its “Active Job Seeker Campaign,” the company seeks to employ people with experience in sectors including mining, boatbuilding, road and bridge construction, electricity distribution and transmission and electronic and precision equipment repair.

NBN is also looking for workers with experience in motor vehicle manufacturing and related sectors. Having enough workers onboard to develop the network was vital for NBN and delivery partners, according to WA corporate affairs manager Ebony Aitken.

“Several thousand skilled workers are needed to build, operate and maintain the NBN network,” Aitken said. “It’s a massive job that we estimate needs the current workforce to almost double in size during our peak construction period. We will be accelerating the build and connection rates to new records and that’s why we need more workers than ever before to help us connect Australia.”

The company seeks to find workers from Perth, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. As part of NBN’s Industry Workforce Development Program, as many as 1,000 Australians have started with their training.

The news of the company launching a recruitment drive comes as it announced to extend fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC) technology to 300,000 premises. With this, the company’s FTTC footprint will include 1 million homes and businesses. The announcement came from Chief network engineering officer Peter Ryan on Tuesday.

The footprint’s expansion will include Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia, Ryan said. "Having a technology as flexible as FTTC in our suite of network tools allows us to be agile with the build," Ryan said. "Premises in the expanded FTTC footprint will be delivered more efficiently from a cost and time perspective."

According to an analysis conducted by iTnews, the company was began favouring the FTTC technology and curbing any future deployments of fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) technology. However, upgrading from FTTN to FTTC will require the network builder to fulfil its 2020 revenue and deployment targets.

FTTC, which requires less copper and more fibre, costs about $2800 per premises. FTTN, on the other hand, costs between $2100 and $2300.