Talk of South Australia's 10 Gigabit City dominated the recent ACS SA Leaders Lunch Panel.

The event saw Adelaide City Council’s Chief Information Officer, Peter Auhl, discuss the 10 Gigabit City network, ahead of the panel discussing the benefits of it to the South Australian economy.

"A foundation for a modern economy, it allows us to create an app store of services for the city.

“Business will now have the tools for real-time digital collaboration, it will strengthen value chains, foster innovation and unleash the Internet of Things,” he said.

The network is being set up to attract new industries within Adelaide and South Australia.

Existing industries needing to move large packets of data quickly, such as defence, medi-tech, advanced manufacturing, the film and music industries, will most benefit from this network.

The network boasts lightning fast data speeds to the city, and, in what will be an Australian-first, it will ‘interconnect’ to cloud-based data centres across the globe, enabling synchronous data speeds that are virtually unachievable with traditional internet services.

ACS CEO Andrew Johnson, ACS Chair Jo Stewart-Rattrey, and Corey Wingard MP, Shadow Minister for Industry.

Topics discussed at the lunch were its relation to SABRENet and the NBN, which Auhl said it would complement, as well as its expansion into other areas of South Australia and interstate, data security and the project’s timeline.

Present at the lunch was ACS CEO Andrew Johnson, who said the network was a bold initiative and went hand-in-hand with security.

“It will provide opportunity for businesses in Adelaide to collaborate and attract overseas organisations,” he said.

A neighbouring fibre-optic network, dubbed 'Gig City', received a $2.9 million boost earlier this year and is being rolled out alongside the NBN.

As part of this lunch, the 2017 SA Pearcey Entrepreneur Award was presented to Geoff Rohrsheim. He is a director at Business SA, which is the chamber of commerce with 4,000 SA businesses, the Royal Auto-mobile Association (RAA) and RAA Insurance.

Pearcey Foundation Head Judge Rick Harvey (L) with Geoff Rohrsheim


Also present at the lunch were ACS Immediate Past-President Brenda Aynsley OAM representing the current President Anthony Wong; ACS Director of Membership, Sales and Marketing Daniel Reihana; ACS Foundation CEO John Ridge, and MPs from South Australia.