Touted as Australia’s largest private, independent digital infrastructure project, HyperOne will have the capacity to carry 10,000 terabits a second and eventually cover 20,000km, connecting the capitals to a host of regional centres, many for the first time.

Despite being mainly about connecting regional Australia, the first phase will be to build a 2300km fibre loop between Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne which Slattery said was done to allow for a quicker connection to those points from the regions.

Slattery said Sydney and Melbourne were the two biggest centres for internet traffic and data storage and desperately needed more capacity.

He said the current fibre network was at least 20 years old and designed for a time that did not include data centres, iPhones or cloud connectivity.

“HyperOne is about building the backbone for the next 30 years,’’ Slattery said.

Victorian company AFL Global had won the bid to manufacture the fibre for the first two stages.

“Today is a significant milestone we start manufacturing fibre to build the foundations of Australia’s first hyperscale network,’’ Slattery said.

“This is a huge job. Just for the first two stages AFL Global will have to manufacture more than 400,000km of glass this is enough to reach to the moon and back or around the world 10 times.

“HyperOne is the game-changer Australia needs to finally deliver connectivity, higher speedss and coverage businesses and households need to turbo-charge our economy.’’

The first stage of the network is to be completed by December 2022 and Slattery said any town it passes that has more than 100 people would have access to the network.