Work has started in earnest to connect Bendigo to the National Broadband Network, with plans to ramp up coverage within city limits as early as February.

NBN Victorian corporate affairs manager Michael Moore said work had begun to bring coverage to Kangaroo Flat, Spring Gully, Flora Hill, Kennington, Strathdale and East Bendigo.

Mr Moore said contractors had already installed 10 or 15 nodes which would connect NBN cables to the existing copper network.

“We’ve got our delivery partner Visionstream hauling cable. They’ve also started to place the nodes around the city,” he said.

”We think that if all goes to plan we should be able to start offering people a service by January or February next year, which is great.

“And we expect to have the whole of Bendigo, which is about 34,000 premises, on by the end of next year.

“We are also (building) in Castlemaine and we are very close to finishing there. So people will probably have a service there by the end of the year, which is great too.” 

Mr Moore said the work was on schedule.

He said pre-election debates between the Labor and Coalition parties about preferred modes of service delivery and download speeds.

“We leave the public discussions to the politicians. We are just moving ahead with getting the construction rolled out.”

Mr Moore said the NBN would deliver a minimum download speed of 25 megabits per per second.

“But what we are finding in many areas is that we are providing 100 megabits per second downloads.”

The City of Greater Bendigo’s Acting director community wellbeing Michael Smyth said he was pleased to see construction begin.

“We’ve been advocating for the NBN to be rolled out in Bendigo for quite a while,” he said. 

“We view the NBN as being much like an essential service – so it’s like power, like water, like gas. So it’s pretty important for industry, pretty important for education. We are finding schools are highly dependent on having good internet services for their students.

“And it’s important for the general community as well.”