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Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, tells Business Spectator's

The second issue that I’ve tried to make sure people understand is the final cost of the network will be dependent on the discussions that will take place between ourselves and Telstra, and ourselves and Optus, and ourselves and Nextgen, and ourselves and TransAct, and ourselves and AAPT and ourselves and Optus, and anyone else who wants to have discussion with us about whether they’d like to invest in the NBN. Now, what I mean by invest is for an equity contribution from us, they may not want to roll their fibre assets into the network. So, the actual cost of the builds could be substantially less if any of those. If any of those companies choose to bring fibre to the table and seek equity in our company, then by definition we’re not going to duplicate where we already own an asset.

RG: You’re saying to Telstra 'bring us in your broadband cables, sell it to us for equity and we won’t duplicate it'?

SC: Well, by definition we won’t duplicate something that we already own within the NBN structure.

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/KGB-INTERROGATION-Stephen-Conroy-pd20090409-QWVYH?OpenDocument&src=sph