Intercity Dark Fibre Network

Footage: Globe featuring map of Australia, with a rapidly moving animated pink line depicting all the capital cities the first fibre optic cable will reach. The footage transitions to Brendon Riley, CEO of Telstra InfraCo, at a construction site.

Footage Text: Construction of nearly 14,000 km of fibre. Connecting mainland capital cities with the latest high speed fibre.

Audio – Brendon Riley: Telstra InfraCo’s intercity fibre project is the biggest investment Telstra has made in terrestrial fibre and infrastructure in the last 30 years. It’s designed to connect the capital cities with the latest high-speed fibre. 

Footage: Montage of dozers laying fibre optic cables in pink and blue. The camera zooms in on the pink fibre, followed by a cut to Kathryn Jones, Executive National Infrastructure Projects in InfraCo, also on site, who is on the construction field working. The blue fibre is then shown. Montage of remote Australian landscapes.

Voiceover – Kathryn Jones: The D9 dozers are laying a pink and a blue fibre. And the pink fibre is the express fibre, high-capacity low-latency resilient fibre that the customers such as Hyperscalers and carriers are really keen to utilise. The other fibre which is the blue foundation fibre that’s where we’re going to provide additional capacity into those remote and regional areas.

Footage: Construction workers in a national park. The landscape changes to scenes of forests and parks.

Voiceover: There’s a lot of consultation that needs to happen before we actually even start constructing. We need to talk to the traditional owners. We need their approval. We need the approval from the national parks, state forests and also, private landholders.

Footage: A montage of tractors and workers operating in various terrains, on both land and sea. Brendon Riley is briefly shown, followed by tractors continuing work in the field.

Voiceover: One of the complexities of the project is just the terrain we need to traverse. And then there’s just weather events, floods, fires. You know, they’re happening all around us as we’re trying to build it. So it’s a slow process.

Footage: A first person perspective of someone working on fibre hardware.  

Voiceover: Sustainability has been at the forefront of the design. The Telstra InfraCo fibre design team worked in conjunction with Prysmian who are manufacturing the fibre in their plant at Dee Why in Sydney.

Footage: A dozer lays the pink and blue fibres as tractors move across the fields.

Voiceover: It’s about the circumference of a five cent piece. That’s a lot smaller than the previous fibre that we would have laid into the ground. That means there’s less plastic, substantially less plastic.

Footage: Montage of server racks.

Voiceover: We’ve got to have telecommunications infrastructure that supports not only the industries of today but the industries of tomorrow.

Footage: Scenes of construction at sea, server racks, city roads, greenhouses, and tiny homes.

Voiceover: Australia needs this capacity to service the subsea cables that are coming in. It’s required to support the next generation of advanced tech industries like AI, data centres, all of those data intensive use cases will require this superfast intercity fibre.

Footage: Montage of tiny homes, people working on some hardware, tractors on the field, sea and landscapes of forests.

Voiceover: You know, one of the reasons that you work at Telstra is to be able to do amazing projects like this. This will serve the nation for a generation to come. I think that’s something we can all be super proud of.

Footage: Zooms out from Australia, then zooms out to the globe.

Footage: Telstra InfraCo logo.