New South Wales (NSW) is the Australian base for international carriers including AT&T, Sprint International, SingTel and Hutchison.
The State is home to three of the five top Australian telecommunication carriers (SingTel-Optus, AAPT and Vodafone) and and all four national Pay TV carriers (FoxTel, Optus Vision, Austar Communications and TARBS).
International call costs are among the lowest in the region.
International communications - growing infrastructure
Australia has an international fibre-optic cable capacity in excess of one terabit. Bandwidth capacity is over four terabits.
Australia's international cable connectivity to the US and Asia is via high capacity fibre optic cables secure and self-restoring cable loops. Automatic rerouting offered by Australian-based telecommunications hubs is of superior quality and reliability in the region.
The new Australia Japan Cable connects the east coast of Australia with Japan and North America. It has doubled existing broadband capacity to the west coast of the United States and increased the capacity to North Asia by 15 times.
Telecommunications - a healthy domestic picture
Australian domestic networks consist of fibre-optic, wireless, satellite and microwave systems. Fibre-optic is the predominant technology. Major networks are Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) based, making the upgrade of existing cables straightforward.
Major fibre-optic networks provided by Telstra, SingTel-Optus, PowerTel, Uecomm and NextGen connect Sydney and the major east-coast cities.
Total bandwidth capacity of satellites covering Australia is estimated to be four Gbps.
The rollout of Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) technology into local exchanges is connecting small and medium businesses and residential homes into a high-speed digital broadband network. With data speeds between 256 kbps to over 2 Mbps, companies and homes will have access to Internet speeds of 30 to 50 times faster than the standard dial-up service.
NSW carries the majority of Australia's Internet traffic and is well placed to capture the rapid growth of e-commerce.
As at March quarter 2005 the number of ISPs in Australia providing dial-up access was 614 and non dial-up access 596.
As at 2006, 70.2 per cent of Australians used the Internet, ahead of the USA (69.6%) and Hong Kong (68.2%).
Technology for better communications
NSW has one of the most sophisticated and robust information communications technology (ICT) infrastructures in the Asia Pacific.
As at November, 2006 more than 350,000 people were employed as ICT workers (including computing professionals and technicians, electronic engineers/technicians and communication technicians) in Australia, with NSW accounting for the highest share at 38%, representing 133,100 people.
Technology companies in Sydney
ICT corporations based or headquartered in Sydney's flourishing high technology corridor include the world's top companies:
- Acer
- AT&T
- Cisco Systems
- Fujitsu Australia
- Google Australia
- IBM Australia
- Microsoft Australia
- Nortel Networks
- Oracle Corporation
- SAP
- SingTel-Optus
- Sprint International
- Sun Microsystems
- Telstra Corporation
- Yahoo Australia