Down to the wire in north
IT’S the cable that dreams could be made of.
Northern Gold Coast business leaders are calling on the council to investigate extending plans for its optic fibre program to the rapidly growing region.
Council recently announced a $10 million plan to add a 37km loop to its existing 45km optic fibre “backbone”, running along the light rail corridor from Helensvale to Broadbeach.
That facility was installed ahead of the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games and delivered tens of millions in free publicity for the coast through the private social media of visitors and athletes as well as the thousands of hours of television and digital broadcast coverage of the Games, beamed to more than 70 countries.
Brisbane-based company Nexium has a contract with Council to on-sell spare optic fibre space to telecommunications carriers. Several Gold Coast companies are finalising agreements with Nexium, delivering ratepayers an early return on their investment.
Gold Coast North Chamber of Commerce secretary Gary Mays said an extension of the program would not only boost industry in the region but could help take pressure off struggling transport infrastructure like the M1 by boosting employment opportunities.
Mr Mays said there were no large commercial nodes in the region at the moment.
“I understand council is not made of money and has to pick and choose its investments wisely but a move like this would create the infrastructure needed for people to be able to work from home,” he said.
“If you had very high-speed internet in the area it would almost create a ready-made market for companies if they were looking to build something like a call centre, for example.
“That whole area is filling up with young families, which means lots of people are looking for part-time work.”
Greg Rix, whose Rix Developments is behind the Pimpama City Shopping Centre, said the region’s unexpected rapid population growth was putting pressure on existing infrastructure and the introduction of a high-speed optic fibre cable could be a massive game-changer, which would possibly create employment growth in the area.
City of Gold Coast figures show the true extent of Pimpama’s population explosion over the past three years with about 1500 residential building approvals granted in the suburb in each of the 2015-16 and 2016-17 financial years.
The latest data for the first three quarters of 2017-18 points to at least another 1000 approvals in the past year, although the final figure could be closer to 1200.
The data shows that Pimpama in each of the past three years accounted for between 18 and 22 per cent of the more than 20,000 total residential approvals across the Gold Coast between mid-2015 and mid-2018.
Based on estimated population figures over the same period, Pimpama alone absorbed 19.2 per cent of the Gold Coast’s total population growth in the 2017 financial year. The figure rose from 11.4 per cent and 17.8 per cent in the preceding two years.
“That’s one fifth of the city’s growth being poured into one suburb in one year,” Mr Rix, whose shopping cen-