“The more capacity we can provide our customers, the more innovation we see. Innovation means not just jobs, but new, interesting, future proof jobs for the next generation of Goondiwindi people. This means that we can keep our young people in region, rather than lose them in a brain drain to the bigger cities. Country Broadband Network is so proud to be part of the growing Digital Pioneers in community.”
Country Broadband Network (CBN) is a retail service provider servicing the Goondiwindi region, backed and supported by Goondiwindi Communications.
The Challenge
Home to 6,000 regional Queenslanders and servicing more than 15,000, Goondiwindi is a digital pioneer – maintaining its historical beauty while fast forwarding into the future of connected agri-business and regional innovation.
Local Goondiwindi service provider, Country Broadband Network (CBN), wants to supply their customers expansive data offerings like those available in Brisbane. CBN has a reputation in the region for being reliable, proactive, and much easier to deal with than nbnTM. They want to shore up their offering – to significantly improve capacity and coverage for their community and customers.
The Solution
QCN provides CBN with an additional 1Gbps capacity to service farmers and local businesses, enabling innovation and flexibility to those in and around Goondiwindi. The Queensland Government, in an initiative to enable regionally based organisations to access the same standard of bandwidth as city-based organisations, has opened access to digital infrastructure that was originally built for Queensland’s electricity network. This highly competitive cost structure enables QCN to provide this capacity at the most competitive pricing for CBN.
Benefits
CBN has more than doubled their backhaul speed to all customers, allowing them to upgrade speeds to existing customers at no extra charge.
QCN enables CBN to offer a fully diverse service. In the rare case of service failure, connectivity will not be totally lost. This kind of redundancy is unheard of in rural areas.
The increased capacity also means that they can grow their business and offer services to new customers as well as more capacity to existing ones.
Digital Pioneers in the Community: Brand New Potential
With new infrastructure comes access to the same business efficiencies that city-based organisations may take for granted – like cloud-based solutions, video conferences and online learning both for companies and schools. With these new efficiencies, organisations can start to dream more and identify new ideas and innovation. This in turn gives greater certainty of jobs, growth in the community and people can plan to stay in region rather than having to move to the city for work or to launch their new business.
The location of the fixed wireless infrastructure on the top of several high building assets throughout town provides line-of-sight to farms surrounding Goondiwindi.
In the future there could be services such as higher capacity fixed wireless Internet to the homestead and wireless backhaul to support these solutions. We could see private LTE (or 4GLite) spanning properties, enabling local IoT, voice and data connectivity. Imagine being able to automate the scanning of cattle going to the abattoir and instantly updating the organisation’s forward projections, on site and in real time. Someone in the station office can see the movement of stock from their computer.
Trent Murray, Director at CBN is already talking with local Goondiwindi businesses about the possibility of upgrading to 10Gb and hosting an Edge Data Centre in Goondiwindi. Goondiwindi continues to represent our true pioneering spirit.
Value
CBN’s improved quality of service means that they can now tender for bigger contracts, even government services, employing more people locally. They can also now offer competitively priced data packages to the local community enabling Goondiwindi residents to get better capacity and coverage at competitive prices.
Country Broadband Network is just one Retail Service provider benefiting from QCN’s mission to deliver high speed communications to Queensland.
Are you ready to connect your region?
