City won't pay for bush broadband: Swan

The Gillard government insists the city won't be slugged to fund affordable broadband in the bush.

Labor has promised equal wholesale prices for metropolitan and country internet users to win over key independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott.

Treasurer Wayne Swan, however, insists city taxpayers won't be funding rural internet users once the national broadband network (NBN) was rolled out.

"No, not necessarily, not at all," he told ABC Television.

But the Australian Telecommunications Users Group said city residents would be the ones who ultimately paid for affordable broadband in regional Australia.

"That's just a fact of life," managing director Rosemary Sinclair told AAP.

"We've done that with fixed access to telephone services so people in the country pay the same line rental as people in the city."

Mr Swan said the $43 billion NBN would still be commercially viable, even with the cross subsidy from Canberra to ensure uniform prices.

"Given the equity investment that we have made, we are satisfied we can make a commercial return and have that uniform wholesale price," he said.

The NBN is to be rolled out during the next eight years so 93 per cent of Australian households can access fast optical fibre broadband with speeds of 1 gigabit a second.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy hinted the infrastructure rollout in the cities could be delayed so the NBN Co, the company setting up the network, could focus on the regions.

"We'll be talking to the team at the National Broadband Network Company over the next few days about how we can redesign the rollout timetable," Senator Conroy told ABC Radio.

"It will mean that we'll be focused more regionally than we otherwise would have been."

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