I am now a supporter of the NBN despite the price tag, politically motivated slow rollout, poor ROI and political lies.
The National Broadband Network is a hugely expensive ($40B), fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), wholesale network that will reach 93% of the Australian population over 10 years. Oh! And paid for by the taxpayers.
The Gillard Government has some numbers claiming that it will pay for itself in the long run. I don’t believe it will ever reach its return on investment of 7% if those numbers are ever audited in the same way private enterprise auditors operate.
I used to see it as a massive waste of money, that Fibre-To-The-Node (FTTN) was a more affordable but almost as good solution for one-third to one-quarter of the cost. I thought that Rob Oakshot and Tony Windsor held the nation hostage in order to get good internet in the bush first – a lower order national policy outcome.
I wasn’t wrong on any of those points. But I have a new perspective that makes them irrelevant.
- $40 Billion over 10 years is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the Gillard (and Labor) Government’s waste. In comparison, the Greens in 2011 stated that Australia’s offshore detention and border protection would cost over $2B in the next year alone. Those are the best numbers I’ve found on a quick search, but other media outlets published similar numbers.
- The copper network is obsolete. Patchwork repairs (like those over the last 30 years) will never see copper achieving anything close to the theoretical and technical optimums. There is no incentive nor financial return to Telstra to refresh the copper network.
- If you live in a multi-unit-dwelling or more than 500 metres from an exchange in a major city, and you want the fastest currently available broadband you already know the difference between the broadband speed you are sold and what you can consistently achieve. For those that haven’t tried it yet, it’s an intermittent and variable painful game of random chance.
Therefore if what we have is currently unusable, it doesn’t matter if we can save even $30billion by going FTTN, because the last mile of internet connectivity relies on the copper network which will never be fixed.
Worse for multi-unit-dwellings there is currently the endless game of pass-the-buck where the ISP blames the Telstra copper or your building wiring and nobody is responsible for providing your service. The NBN removes this debate for a significant and growing proportion of the population.
If you don’t believe governments are wasteful then the cost debate doesn’t matter. If you do believe governments are wasteful then the waste on the NBN is justifiable given the national productivity and long term infrastructure arguments.
What do you think?
3 responses to “Why I moved from Anti-NBN to Pro-NBN”
I think that FTTN is nowhere near “good enough”, in the same way that I don’t believe that forcing Telstra/Optus to open up their Cable networks is “good enough”. Both potentially lead to vastly inferior outcomes except in “ideal” scenarios. Neither are future-proof in the way that FTTP is. FTTN does nothing to address the copper issues and Cable only works if nobody else is using it – similarly with wireless. I do agree with you on the waste aspect, but I do think the NBN is a truely worthwhile investment, at least in its current intended form. It solves so many problems (for the vast majority of the population) and opens up a world of opportunities we haven’t yet dreamed of. As a note of caution in relation to multi-unit dwellings though – I will point out that NBNCo have not yet worked out how they are going to connect such premises to the NBN … they face similar difficulties currently faced by everyone with copper … whose responsibility is it to actually connect everyone within the complex to the network?
and yet in Paris, for 32 Euros you can get cable tv with 160 channels, internet, wifi, a land line and free phone calls to 1 nominated foreign country. How can you be pro NBN when it is a bloody massive white elephant?
It’s a bit difficult to compare a relatively compact country like France which has such a large population compared to us (117 people per km^2 compared to 3 people per km^2 in Australia!). You also mentioned “Paris”, not other cities – are those prices available nationwide across France? Infrastructure of this scale in a country so large with relatively small population is always going to be expensive to build (per capita), but is that a good enough reason to not build it? I’m not sure it’s reasonable to compare France with Australia in regards to telecommunications infrastructure.