Thank you. Alright, it's 14 minutes past 7 o'clock. Now, do you ever sit at home getting frustrated by the speed of your internet connection? Well, even broadband services in Australia are considerably slower than in many parts of the world. Are you tired of waiting on companies like Telstra? The Queensland Government is preparing to do something about it.

It wants to build a cutting-edge fibre optic network that promises internet services 100 times faster than regular broadband that we're used to now. For more, we're joined by computer expert Jeremy Howard. Good morning to you. Now, let's start at the beginning. Why are we so far behind the rest of the world?

Well, that's a good question. I think a lot of it is to do with... Well, in the end, I think, really, the government and Telstra have dropped the ball over the last few years. In the States, where I just spent three months, real fast broadband was everywhere. People were used to downloading video on demand and video conferencing.

Productivity in the workplace was much higher. I think when it comes to having a monopoly supplier like Telstra has been, they can get a bit fat and lazy, to be honest. Because I guess a lot of us are surprised. We thought broadband was as fast as it got, but Premier Peter Beatty's saying that this new service can be 100 times faster than regular broadband.

Is that right 100 times? That's right, Mel. In fact, elsewhere in the world, they wouldn't call what we have here broadband. Broadband is a service that allows people to access the kind of services I was talking about, like video on demand. We don't really have broadband in this country, except for a few companies like Primus and Internode, which have actually really innovated here and are providing that to very small parts of the nation.

But it's people like the Queensland Government that need to step forward and provide this to the rest of the country. So how will their system work? Well, it's pretty unclear on the details at this stage, but one of the really expensive parts of this is actually getting access to places to put the cables.

So what the Queensland Government is saying is that they're going to provide access to the power lines, the rights of way next to railways and so forth. So there's actually somewhere to put the highest bid fibre optic cables. They're talking about a cost of $550 million just to cover southeast Queensland.

So that's a pretty big expense, and that's where the real question is here. And what about cost to consumers, Jeremy? Is it just going to be so expensive that none of us will be able to afford to have it? That's what I'm worried about. If you look at what Telstra's done with their NextG network that they're so excited about, they're talking about $200 a month to get reasonable amounts of volume on that.

If it costs $550 million, that could end up being about $1,000 to the consumer. So I think this is the big issue, is whether this is actually going to be affordable for people to take advantage of it. Jeremy Howard, thank you for your time this morning and explaining it.

Thank you.