To improve access at 766 campuses, covering 350,000 pupils, Telstra has picked up a contract extension worth AU$130 million from the Western Australia government.
WA Education Minister Sue Ellery said that this deal ensures that more than 97% of public schools will receive more than 20 times the annual rise in bandwidth, with many seeing even more significant raises. It will provide students with new and engaging learning experiences and introduce parity between urban and rural schools and their neighborhoods in bandwidth.
The government said that broadband would “deliver the benefits of high-speed fiber” while raising the “base bandwidth” from 100Kbps to 2Mbps for students and employees. It added that it will continue working on expanding connectivity at 23 schools still relying on satellite communications in the state.
Telstra said AU$30 million would be spent on improving local exchanges and backhaul, which would also improve “the entire local community and other local government agencies.”
The project work will commence next year and will be “progressively deployed.”
Two years ago, Telstra reached an AU$80 million contract with South Australia to connect 514 schools to fiber links, bringing fiber out to 98.8% of schools in the province. This year the agreement was revised to cover pre-schools, cybersecurity, and deployments of WebEx.
In October, to deploy over 5,200 kilometers of fiber to over 2,000 campuses, New South Wales handed over AU$328 million to Telstra.
Victoria and Telstra combined at the pandemic height to make available 21,000 additional dongles for students to use while schools were closed.
