Ms Carolan Lennon:

I would make a couple of points. It is not all clustered. We have strung 27,000 km of fibre. If they were all grouped in clusters, we would not have needed 27,000 km. This is rural, and it is down those rural ribbons. I agree with the Senator, however, that in the next tranche, the intervention footprint, the distribution is much more scarce. It is the point I made earlier. We will have to string three times the amount of fibre as before to cover those homes. That gives a sense of how much more dispersed and spread out they are. Of course, that drives the costs and it drives the time to do it. It will drive some harder connections as well because some of them will be much more remote.

I would hate people to think that the 300,000 were urban. They were not. They were quite rural.