Alcatel-Lucent Australia managing director, Andrew Butterworth, said the links will provide blackspot areas with new broadband and mobile services.

"We have the technology ready and all the right people in place to get started straight away on this deployment, which is a great step forward for the government's wider (NBN)," Butterworth said.

"[The] network will easily scale to meet the dramatically increasing backhaul capacity demands that we anticipate the NBN to drive over the next eight years and beyond." A world-first wavelength tracker will be used to improve traffic monitoring and fault management within the optical network. Alcatel-Lucent will also deploy a new multi-service transport platform that supports any mix of traffic from all-circuit to all packet, along with its 1626 Light Manager and 1830 Photonic Service Switch.

Alcatel-Lucent will undertake support from its global network operations centre in Sydney.