Mike Quigley, NBN Co.'s CEO, is retiring from the company after leading the team that is building out and operating Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN). Quigley will continue to serve as CEO until the company's board finds a suitable replacement.
Having come out of retirement in 2009 following a 36-year career at Alcatel, the predecessor company to Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), Quigley said his job of laying the foundations for the next 30 years of NBN "is largely complete."
After suffering a three-month delay due to a lack of qualified workers and what it said were "ambitious" targets, NBN Co. reported last week that it had met its revised end-of-year target of 190,000 to 220,000 homes passed by its fiber to the home rollout.
Still, whoever takes over from Quigley will face two immediate challenges.
First, Quigley's replacement will have to find a solution for wholesale customers such as iiNet that are threatening to split from NBN. Although iiNet just began offering services over NBN in Perth last month, it recently said it might abandon NBN if the company does not lower its wholesale prices.
Then, there's Australia's Liberal-National coalition political party, which has proposed an alternative hybrid copper/fiber-based fiber to the node (FTTN) architecture, rather than fiber to the premises (FTTP), to deliver 25 Mbps speeds to the country's residents and businesses.
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