Children read along with Andy Griffiths via video conference. Credit:Ben Grubb "There was obviously a technical glitch there," Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said. "Technical glitches happen. You'll have to ask Optus, but they were able to restore it." Mr Griffiths' appearance occurred soon after Senator Conroy, his Labor colleagues, and local children pressed a large orange button to mark the start of access to the super-fast broadband network in Blacktown. The Max Webber Library is connected to an NBN fibre connection with Optus as the retail service provider. Optus checked its equipment, including modem, and said that there was no network issue at the library's end.

NBN Co spokeswoman Rhonda Griffin said the fault was to do with a glitch in the audio-visual software. "The connection was restored in seconds," she said. Aside from the drop out, the video conference's audio quality wasn't spectacular and there was about a three-second delay - but that didn't appear to wipe the smiles off of the children reading along with Mr Griffiths. The video itself was crystal clear and you could make out the book's front cover that Mr Griffiths was reading. Blacktown is the first existing "brownfield" suburb in Sydney to get access to Labor's $37.4 billion fibre-to-the-home network, which will connect 93 per cent of the nation's premises directly to optical fibre cable at speeds of up to 100 megabits per seconds, and later at speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second. Some new development areas in Sydney, or "greenfields", have had access to Labor's fibre for a period of time now. The remaining 7 per cent of premises will be able to connect at slower speeds via satellite or wireless.

For 71 per cent of homes, the Coalition plans to spend $20.4 billion connecting fibre only up to street cabinets (known as fibre-to-the-node), with the existing ageing copper network used for the last mile to the premises. For the households that cannot be serviced by fibre, fixed wireless and satellite technologies will be used. The Coalition promises 25 megabits per second minimum speeds to all households by 2016 and has said that it will boost this to 50 megabits per second for the "vast majority of households" by 2019, with some receiving up to 100 megabits per second. It claims it will be able to achieve the faster speeds using "vectoring" technology. At the sideline of the Blacktown event, Senator Conroy slammed Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's claim that Australian families would only need 25 megabits per seconds. "We are absolutely confident 25 megs is going to be enough - more than enough - for the average household," Opposition Leader Tony Abbott told a press conference when announcing his alternative NBN in April. "That will go down with that famous Bill Gates quote that people claim he said about the number of computers we'd need and the amount of storage on computers that other famous IT gurus have made," Senator Conroy told Fairfax Media. "So that is up there with the pantheon of dumb comments about technology.

"Tony Abbott still isn't Bill Gates and still doesn't understand what the internet is about," Senator Conroy said, referring to the infamous interview Kerry O'Brien conducted with Tony Abbott on the 7.30 Report in 2010. "Families now have so many devices in their homes and it's not about one killer app. You'll never find NBN Co or the Gillard government saying one app is why you need these speeds. It's about all the different things people do in their homes today, and more importantly all the things they're going to do in the future..." In a statement, Coalition spokesman for communications, Malcolm Turnbull, said Labor had failed to achieve in the past six years "any of its roll-out plans", and that this must "seem like a sick joke" to the electorate. "Stephen Conroy thinks he can disguise reality and six years of policy failure with yet more spin and by spending yet more taxpayers' money on ads," Turnbull said. "This insults the intelligence of the electorate." NBN Co forecast in its plan that high speed fibre optic cable would pass 341,000 premises by June 30 but in March it downgraded that figure to between 190,000 and 220,000.

Though roll-out targets had been missed, Senator Conroy said progress had been made. ''We have 54,000 people today in Australia using the national broadband network,'' he said. This reporter is on Facebook: /bengrubb