/spandiv style="float:right;width:305px;display:inline;font-size:13px;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;line-height:16px;" img src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/53632000/jpg/_53632840_102575289.jpg" width="304" height="171" alt="NBN company"span style="width:304px;"The National Broadband Network Company is leading the new infrastructure project/span /div p class="introduction"The Australian government has reached an agreement with two telecommunications companies to bring high-speed internet to most of the nation./p pTelstra and Optus will close down their infrastructure and transfer customers to the national broadband network./p pTelstra will make A$11bn ($11.6bn; pound;7.2bn) over decades./p pAustralia's big distances and rough terrain mean high costs and slow internet speeds for many./p pOptus, owned by Singapore Telecommunications, will make A$800m./p pThe deals are part of the government's plans to roll out a A$36bn national broadband network./p pThe project is lead by the state-owned National Broadband Network Company./p pThe plan is to connect more than 90% of Australia's population to a fibre optic network that will be among the fastest in the world. /ppThis article is from the a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk" title="Link to BBC News"BBC News website/a. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cYmcTs8ALiHOONX_QzaIlB4DmNM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cYmcTs8ALiHOONX_QzaIlB4DmNM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cYmcTs8ALiHOONX_QzaIlB4DmNM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cYmcTs8ALiHOONX_QzaIlB4DmNM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BbcNewsTechnologyFullFeed/~4/qgpd6_IR8fE" height="1" width="1"/