ARCHERS - connecting strata communities

The National Broadband Network Co will cover the costs of rewiring old apartment blocks to ensure they can connect to the service.

The decision comes as the national association for strata managers and body corporates, the National Community Titles Institute, warned that landlords would not be willing to foot the bill for any extra costs needed to get the best service offered by the NBN.

"We would encourage landlords to make the NBN available to tenants but inevitably there could be a cost involved and in most situations like this, landlords are less willing than owner-occupied units to meet those costs," NCTI executive officer Mark Lever told The Australian. "This might have to be something that body corporates resolve themselves, and also pay for it."

Those fears should be assuaged as the NBN Co yesterday confirmed to The Australian that it had recently formalised its position on connecting multi-dwelling units (MDU) to the NBN. The formal position is in line with one of the 84 recommendations outlined in the $25 million McKinsey KPMG implementation study, which the government is yet to respond to.

"We will be doing MDU re-wiring during rollout -- because we have said our objective is to bring an NTU (network terminating unit) to each premises free of charge. As the name suggests, the NTU is the end of our network," an NBN spokeswoman said.

The NBN Co did not say whether the task of rewiring old apartment blocks would affect the NBN's $43bn price tag, but the spokeswoman said the cost had been factored into its business plan, which was submitted to its board last week.

According to the implementation study, enlisting the co-operation of the body corporates that oversee MDUs is crucial in ensuring the financial success of the NBN.

MDUs account for one-third of the nation's premises and an unwillingness by body corporates to connect to the NBN, coupled with disparate state approaches to the way premises are being connected to the network, could wreak havoc on the government's and the NBN Co's plans to ensure the maximum number of premises sign up to the network.

The NCTI -- which represents the vast majority of the 270,000 body corporates around the nation -- has warned that unless the government and NBN Co start engaging with strata managers and body corporates about how the network will be connected to apartments, then many of the multi-dwelling units could miss out on the NBN.

"It's all speculative at the moment. We actually don't know how the NBN is going to approach body corporates and how they will install the NBN at MDUs," Mr Lever said.

So far, the government and the NBN Co have not entered formal discussions with any bodies representing strata managers or the body corporates.

However, the NBN Co said it would use the first five release sites in its mainland build -- in Willunga, Brunswick, Townsville, Kiama and Armidale -- to test a range of installation and deployment methods in MDUs.