What has gone wrong with the NBN? - ABC News (Australian ... [PDF]

The Drum By Paddy Manning Updated Wed 2 Mar 2016, 9:27am

The latest leaked NBN document gives us more insight into the project which was meant to be about "nation building", but which is now turning into a politicised quagmire, writes Paddy Manning. Yesterday's leaked internal document revealing that the NBN's rollout of fibre-to-the-node has been well behind schedule is further confirmation that Malcolm Turnbull's version of the NBN is proving to be much more expensive to deliver than was originally hoped. Remember that the only merit of Turnbull's "multi-technology mix" (MTM) was that it would be cheaper to build, and arrive sooner. There was no question that it was technically inferior to the former Labor government's mostly fibre-to-the-premises network, which then shadow communications minister Turnbull derided as a "Rolls-Royce" option.

PHOTO: Labor's all-fibre network would have cost

between $44 billion and $73 billion. (David Hancock, file photo: AFP)

But if the Coalition's NBN could be delivered cheaper and sooner, there was a good argument that the earlier arrival of revenue from business and residential customers could fund subsequent upgrades to the network. It hasn't worked out that way. The MTM network has blown out twice in projected cost - first, from $29.5 billion to $41 billion, and then last year to "up to" $56 billion. And instead of delivering 25 Mbps by 2016, now the MTM network isn't expected to be finished until 2020 - only a year earlier than Labor expected to finish its rollout. NBN's own chairman has admitted meeting this 2020 target will require a "heroic" effort. The NBN debate remains a giant political "he said, she said" in which neither side gives the other any credit. In a Background Briefing program late last year, I tried to cut through the thicket of NBN politics to discover the truth of where our largest, most significant infrastructure project stands. There is a non-partisan way through the debate, in my view, but it relies on an analysis of an ever-receding counter-factual scenario: what would have happened under Labor. The PM and communications minister Mitch Fifield are being cute when they say - as they did again yesterday - that reverting to Labor's fibreto-the-premises NBN would take an extra 6-8 years to complete and cost an extra $30 billion. That is an estimate of the cost of going back to Labor's NBN, after having embarked upon the Coalition's version in 2013. It is not the amount that Labor's NBN would have cost if it had continued as originally planned. Obviously, it is much more inefficient to change horses mid-stream, then change back again. Forget Labor's numbers for a moment, Malcolm Turnbull's own strategic review in December 2013 came up with an estimate that the fibre-tothe-premises network would have cost $73 billion.

It is true that Labor's NBN was behind schedule and over-budget when the government lost office in 2013. But as a matter of degree, they were only a year behind, and only a few billion over-budget, on their own figures - which, by the way, respected former NBN chief Mike Quigley stands by to this day. Labor had very good reasons for being behind: firstly, they were negotiating a one-off deal with Telstra that would see the ageing copper network - which Telstra's own engineers thought was at five minutes to midnight - retired. Then Telstra chief David Thodey was convinced it was the right deal both for Telstra and the country. Secondly, the NBN was not only starting from scratch, with all the inevitable teething problems - it had to build the national transit network, the "backbone" of the NBN. This was another one-off, up-front exercise that was expensive but was duly completed and is relied on by NBN today. A more substantial criticism is that Labor's NBN rollout lacked any market discipline: there was no attempt to target those areas that were readiest to pay for fast broadband, such as business precincts. Instead, some unlikely regional areas were targeted, and while this might have been defensible for nation-building reasons, it also undoubtedly made the rollout much more expensive for taxpayers. A huge component of the cost of the NBN is debt and the quicker you can earn revenue, the lower your borrowings need to be, and therefore the lower your ongoing interest bill. It was imperative to target suburbs with the highest likely take-up rates. Lastly on Labor's errors, there was the rejection of fibre-to-the-basement connections to the hundreds of thousands of apartments in Australia's most densely populated cities. Even the staunchest defenders of the fibre-to-the-premises network concede this was a mistake, which would have led to a crazy rewiring of recently completed tower buildings that already had perfectly serviceable internal cabling capable of gigabit speeds. (Admittedly, it's a different story for the suburban three-story blocks of flats which were Labor's primary concern when devising the policy.) For all that, Labor's all-fibre network would have been built, for somewhere between the NBN's contemporaneous costings of $44 billion and the Coalition's estimate of $73 billion. Once connected, it would have been a readily- and endlessly-upgradeable network with fibre servicing 93 per cent of homes and businesses, and would have been a highly-attractive proposition for institutional investors.

PHOTO: If really pressed on his NBN role, the PM resorts to a rhetorical defence. (AAP: Lukas Coch)

Thanks to the Abbott and Turnbull governments, what have we got instead? The promise that underpinned the original MTM network, that all Australians would have 25Mpbs or higher by the end of 2016, has long been broken. Since the NBN's corporate plan was released last August we have known that costs have blown out to between $46 billion and $56 billion (and we all know that when a project proponent specifies a likely range of costs, it is wise to assume the upper estimate). Based on the upper estimate, that's a 90 per cent increase, or almost a doubling in the cost of the project. One of the key cost increases was in IT, as the NBN's computers had to be upgraded to cope with the extra complexity of integrating the new mix of connection technologies, a direct consequence of the switch to a MTM. The latest leak confirms the copper-based fibre-to-the-node component of the MTM - which will bring fibre through to fridge-sized cabinets on many street corners - is proving difficult. One of the well-known disadvantages of fibre-to-the-node is that the nodes require power. That there have been delays due to negotiations with electricity suppliers was predictable and can only be considered a failure of network planning.

Again, this should not be a surprise: one of NBN's own directors, Simon Hackett, said last year that fibre-to-the-node is a "dud", and NBN has already started trialling faster technologies that will rely on bringing fibre closer to the home, to what is known as the distribution point or "fibreto the-curb", potentially replacing fibre-to-the-node altogether but increasing the rollout cost again. Reusing and upgrading the Hybrid Fibre Coaxial network - the pay-TV cables bought from Telstra and Optus - was defensible in theory but is also proving more difficult than expected in practice, with a leak last year suggesting the Optus network was unfit for purpose and would need to be overbuilt at a cost of more than half a billion dollars. HFC trials so far have been encouraging and there is no doubt that the planned DOCSIS3.1 technology can deliver superfast internet speeds, but it will not be cheap and the major rollout will not begin until 2017-18. The upshot is that we have a NBN which gives some lucky home and business owners a fibre-optic connection courtesy of Labor's abandoned rollout, while the rest of us wait for our HFC cable to be upgraded or make do with a much slower copper-based connection that will probably need to be replaced. The whole hotchpotch will be worth $27 billion - less than half its likely construction cost - when it is finished and put up for sale, according to a recent estimate by PwC. There is no doubt Labor's NBN would have sold for more, improving the return for taxpayers. If really pressed on his NBN role, the PM resorts to a rhetorical defence, blaming Labor for starting the project - his preferred wheeze is the Irish joke, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here" - and mounting an elegant-sounding attack on the very idea that anything can ever be "future-proofed", a theme he hammered home when he took over the leadership. This is unassailable high ground for Malcolm Turnbull, but it is completely wrong-headed. NBNCo is leaking and, if what I'm hearing from former staff is right, morale inside the organisation is abysmal, management is hostage to every expensive consultancy in town, and senior staff are leaving, disillusioned, as what they thought was a nation-building project is turning into a politicised quagmire. As one former employee told me: "I'll be amazed if it ever gets built." This is an unforgiveable state of affairs for such a vital project and, whoever wins the next election, the NBN will need to be redesigned again. Hopefully it will be done with the national interest, not politics, uppermost in mind. Paddy Manning is a journalist and author of the recently published Born To Rule: The Unauthorised Biography Of Malcolm Turnbull (MUP). Topics: internet-technology, telecommunications, federal-government, turnbull-malcolm

First posted Tue 1 Mar 2016, 11:16am

Comments for this story are closed.

Dove: 01 Mar 2016 3:23:28pm What went wrong? Politics Alert moderator

the yank: 01 Mar 2016 3:54:40pm Closer to the mark Turnbull. Alert moderator

Dinkum: 01 Mar 2016 5:09:00pm Fibre to the node was as much Abbot's as anyone else. Once again another belief-driven, monocular ,exhibition of ignorance. despite the very substantial body of knowledge to the contrary. Creationism, alive and well, in IT clothes. Alert moderator

Cyn: 01 Mar 2016 9:13:06pm That was hardly the case Dinkum, what it really was was a complete inability to admit Labor did something good on Abbott's part, it was just his style of politics (relentless and unthinking). As a hypothetical example Rudd or Gillard could have come up with a proposal (with a 100% chance of success for the sake of a hypothetical) that would have jump started the economy, created a 20% of GDP budget surplus, kept inflation low, paid for the increased defence spending Abbott promised plus some (and build the subs in Adelaide), built all the infrastructure we could possibly need for the next 20 years over the course of 4 years, increased heath and education funding, not only stopped boat people but get people smugglers to voluntarily start patrolling the water off northern Australia for other people smuggler boats and tow them back to Indonesia, and cut taxes on everyone down to 1%, and Abbott would still have called it a bad plan because the tax cut wouldn't have been large enough, and the surplus would be too small and would have claimed to be able to do all those same things, but reduce taxes to 0.5% on everyone, increased the surplus to 25% of GDP and built all the infrastructure for the next 40 years in a little over a day and a half at a seventh (1/7) the cost. Alert moderator

v: 02 Mar 2016 12:03:59pm cyn, "what it really was was a complete inability to admit Labor did something good on Abbott's part" While I am perfectly comfortable with the idea of Abbott's notorious small-mindedness, I think that this was more of a contributing factor than a driver. At the moment, Foxtel enjoys an effective monopoly over the distribution of on-line entertainment content in Australia. A fully functional modern broadband network like the NBN would destroy the monopoly by providing competitors with a fast, reliable communications platform, which they could use for the distribution of entertainment content. Foxtel is part of the Newscorp group, owned and controlled by Rupert Murdoch - a major sponsor of the Liberal Party. Murdoch also has extensive holdings in the US educational services market and is looking to expand his "Charter Schools" (private schools paid for by the taxpayer) system into Australia. This move was threatened by the Gonski reforms, and the Liberal Party has withdrawn funding for the Gonski reforms after promising to fully fund them during the last election campaign. It is known as "policy for sale". Seventy years ago, Australians turned their backs on the predecessor of the Liberal Party (the United Australia Party) over a scandal concerning....that's right - policy for sale. Even if Abbott were not a screwed up bag of resentment, the Liberal Party's "contractual obligations" to News Limited would have still wrecked the NBN. Alert moderator

JohnnoH: 01 Mar 2016 11:50:59pm Abbott was PM, Turnbull was Communications Minister in charge of the project. Both lied through their teeth. Alert moderator

Mathew: 02 Mar 2016 12:40:21am Currently for 79% of Australians on the NBN connected to fibre who have chosen to connect at 25Mbps, it would make zero real world difference to switch their connection between FTTN, HFC or FTTP. Labor promoted FTTP NBN as nation building opening new opportunities, yet approved an NBNCo Corporate Plan predicting that in 2026 close to 50% of connections on fibre would be 12Mbps and less than 1% would be on 1Gbps. Other nations are rolling out fibre networks today where the speed for everyone is 1Gbps. The reality today is that in the past 12 months the number of 100Mbps connections has dropped from 19% to 16% as more late adopters connect to the network and choose the cheaper, slower plans. Labor expected that NBNCo ARPU would rise quickly from $33 to over $100/month. It is doubtful that the average Australian is going to triple their telecommunications spend just for a high speed data connection While a small number loudly proclaim the technical benefits of FTTP, they failed to acknowledge that currently for 79% of Australians, Labor's artificial financial model simply isn't delivering the promised eHeath and eLearning benefits because people aren't prepared to pay. A good reality check on how relevant fast internet is to the average Australian is to look at real-estate advertising. I'm yet to see an examples of FTTP being promoted by agents as a selling point and sales people are keen to promote any feature. As a government project the NBN should be delivering a benefit to the community. Labor clearly stated in the first NBNCo Corporate Plan that 100Mbps was required for the key benefits, yet approved a plan where 50% were predicted to connect at 12Mbps. Currently only 16% (and falling) on FTTP are connected at the minimum 100Mbps that Labor stated was the minimum for the key benefits. Either we accept that the minimum standard is 12Mbps and build a network capable of that with the ability to upgrade for those who demand more, or we set a standard that 100Mbps is the bare minimum. Building a network where only the rich can use it's full potential is like building a toll-way with a special fast lane for those prepared to triple the toll, to travel 100 times a fast. Labor's NBN plan has been demonstrated in the real world to entrench and increase the digital divide, because only the rich can afford the fast speeds and with ARPU rising that divide will become greater. Labor had the opportunity to build a network that enabled everyone to have cheap fast access, instead the constructed an artificial financial model resulting in benefits to only a small minority (16% and falling). The small minority who want FTTP should be prepared to either move or pay for fibre. It takes a special level of skill to implement a solution this badly. If Labor had simply read and comprehended their own Corporate Plan, then FTTN wouldn't be an option because 100% of FTTP connections w Alert moderator

hoolibob: 02 Mar 2016 6:15:31am For well over 2 months I've been battling a USB modem from my service provider who sold me on a coverage I was told I would get of 2G or on good days 3G. Slow or not that would have made no difference. Instead the signal I've received after well over 70 calls has been pre-dominently been a very weak 2G & rarely given. What I find interesting though is I've been checking signals available when I can't connect on perfect weather days & found from that the service provider has got 3G available - I have many screen shots. What has been stopping my pre-paid access to that signal is the service providers own programming. I have screen shots that tell me I'm out of prepaid credits when I have well over 11GB's I monitor usage as well. It is my belief this is being done to compel this customer to purchase higher value packages with the service provider that would be of no more benefit than a good 2G as I don't need movie or music streaming. I find this leaked document interesting because after making 2000 word complaint that received a copy of their legal notice as a response nothing was done on just some of the findings I told them a copy was going to the ombudsman & ABC (16pgs worth I'm pretty thorough) just shortly before the leak. It includes little gems like their selling XP SP3 product internet access when there backup internet self monitoring programmes weren't viewable by XP SP3 users. On that topic I also found the special mention of Payne Defence Minister of XP in an address recently. Now that our internet movements are being tracked what impact would non-XP conducive tracking have had on slowing down & possibly crashing our usage. Anyone that tried to access Centrelink knows new programmes there weren't XP conducive. Alert moderator

Kismet: 02 Mar 2016 9:41:53am Hi Hooli, I think you got sold a pup by your ISP. 2G is way out of date and snail pace, in fact I did not know it was still switched on by anyone and 3G is now old and slow. You need to be on a 4G connection. As to your problem with XP, that isn't your problem. I suspect your web browser is way out of date and needs an urgent upgrade. At least XP is stable unlike Vista and 8.1. Alert moderator

hoolibob: 02 Mar 2016 1:17:22pm Many thanks Kismet for your interest. Amazingly, today I've been going between 3G & a strong 2G. Is it going to change the report going across absolutely not. This customer & voter believes that all customers & voters deserve the right to what they pay for when operators are licenced under a regulated industry. If my signal diminishes there's always the good Australian Post. Alert moderator

v: 02 Mar 2016 3:52:06pm kismet, "You need to be on a 4G connection. " If you can get it. Besides, regardless of whether you are using 4G, 3G, 2G or GSM, the reliability, speed and capacity of your connection is limited by the utliisation of the network. If there is nobody else using the spectrum at the time, you may APPEAR TO achieve speeds (but not bandwidth) comparable to a slow ADSL or DSL connection. But it would be rare indeed for you to encounter this situation. Under normal circumstances you will be competing for bandwidth with hundreds or even thousands of other users and speed will slow to the point where you get nostalgic for dial-up. The other thing that you have to remember is the at published speeds of wireless connections show the speed at which raw data is transmitted through the network medium, but do not address the quality of the data being transmitted and received. And to demonstrate why this is important, I am going to have to delve into a little networking theory here. Don't worry, I'll keep it simple. Imagine the following scenario: You need to communicate a set of instructions to someone in another room. If you shout loud enough, the person in the other room can almost hear you clearly, but frequently has to ask you to repeat the previous instruction. Then you discover that both rooms have telephones. If you deliver the instructions by telephone, the other person hears clearly and there is no requirement for instructions to be repeated. Which method of communication would you choose? Wireless communications relies on broadcasts of data, and this necessarily leads to high levels of packet loss and packet "scrambling". This makes the protocols used in wireless networking very "fat" because they are bloated with errorchecking, correction and re-transmissionb routines that are not required on cabled networks. What this means is that most of the 12 megabits you receive each second is junk that has nothing to do with the actual data you wish to receive or send. So a 12 mbs wireless connection will take a lot longer to download a gigabyte of useful information than a 12 mbs cabled connection. Alert moderator

Jasonk: 02 Mar 2016 7:30:50am LOL spending $56B to deliver the speed 79% are using now or $64B to deliver the speeds people could have a choice to pay for. Alert moderator

Jess: 02 Mar 2016 11:09:04am In Canberra the type of internet connection is most definitely on both rental and sales adverts of properties. Part of the reason that the connections are on the lower tier is because there needs to be a critical mass of people with the capabilities of high speed internet - The "New" NBN doesn't allow for the majority to have high speeds so why would people create material that the majority of customers can't access? Alert moderator

Chas: 02 Mar 2016 11:13:28am This is a completely disingenuous claim considering a huge chunk of those folks (20% of all connections according to Telstra) are connected only for voice (which is listed as a 12/1 connection). If you remove them, then only 59% are at 25Mbps, and 41% are on the high end plan... Alert moderator

Cyn: 02 Mar 2016 11:44:05am Matthew take a look at the price difference for the highest speed NBN plans and the slowest speed ones. The difference is only around $20 to $40 a month and when the difference is around $40 a month it involves a going for a completely different package and increased downloads from a very low limit (e.g. 200GB split between on and off peak for IInet) to a much larger limit (e.g. 1000GB for IInet). Cost is not much of an issue, I'd think most of the problem would be that available NBN plans from most companies don't include all the available speed option NBN provides, they might have download/uploads speeds of 12/1MBps, 25/5MBps and 100/40MBps available but not have a 50/20MBps option available. That makes the jump from the second fastest to the fastest available speed quite large and people would worry about using all their downloads with the higher speeds. Also Telstra is about as unclear as it gets to explaining the speed options available to NBN customers (as it turns out they have two options 25/5MBps and 100/40MBps). I think between Telstra and Optus they are imposing a minimum speed available to 25/5MBps and their market share ensures they can. Alert moderator

igfbss: 02 Mar 2016 12:14:23pm Just one point if your look at the Live West development the big notice boards on the development are advertising High Speed Internet with Fibre to the home. So it is being promoted. Alert moderator

gOD: 02 Mar 2016 2:59:14pm NO. Alert moderator

brian: 02 Mar 2016 2:09:25am The problem is the Liberals generally. Their party represents not 'liberal' values anymore, but simple conservatism of the worst kind. In the old, noble days, before Howard, liberal ideology was free-market based, individual freedom. Today, the Liberals are now anti-this. They want only power, and their liberal ideology is lost. As Malcolm Fraser former PM and leader of the Liberals said, "The Liberal Party is no longer a liberal party, but a conservative party". This extends to basically bitter tactics to destroy ideas from other parties, even to the point where such stances are antiscientific, anti-UN, anti-national interest, and anti-economic, which are not original liberal values at all. I know many Liberal-voters, stalwarts who have voted Liberal their whole lives, are horrified by what they see now in the last two years, and say to me repeatedly they could never vote Liberal again. I hope the coming election many will see the changes and vote accordingly. Alert moderator

The Concerned Citizen: 02 Mar 2016 9:19:49am Let's be frank. The NBN project should simply be killed off. I'm personally not interested in forking out $70B+ for a public-private project that doesn't even seem to want to include WiFi. The entire NBN was destined to be a failure when the government let private telcos (especially useless Telstra) to own and handle a portion of the project. From that point on, the NBN ceased to be about providing a service for Australian consumers (which would prioritize the best and most efficient infrastructure), and became about providing a convenient source of revenue for Telstra- at the expense of the entire nation. It's become an exceptionally expensive white elephant. Just cancel it already. Alert moderator

Rae: 02 Mar 2016 10:05:56am I agree. It is also a worry that a power supply failure would shut the whole thing down when we no longer own our power supplies. In the 5 day power failure here at least the copper line gave me a phone out to others on the copper network. All the mobiles were down because of power failure to the towers. Pretty easy for a foreign owner to shut our power and communications systems down. Alert moderator

AJ: 02 Mar 2016 11:30:23am Hi Concerned Citizen, The Labor plan had fixed wireless for part of the 7% that wouldn't get FTTP. By the way, wireless runs on top of the wired backbone. It isn't a large scale solution, as the connection slows when more people connect. End result is you'd end up with crappier speeds. For some of us, even FTTN is an improvement on what we get now - in my case 5Mbps on ADSL2+. Alert moderator

Watermelon: 02 Mar 2016 1:25:23pm Noooo, don't kill of the NBN. Where we live (just 10km from the CBD) we are lucky to get any internet at all. We are currently managing with a 1.5mbs connection through ADSL but it was months before a port was available to us. Can't get wireless due to trees between us and all the local towers, no cable in the area and 4G is great when it works but keeps dropping out. The NBN is the only hope we have of anything even remotely approaching first world internet, and even that we won't get until 2018. Alert moderator

magb1: 02 Mar 2016 12:15:56pm Well said. Alert moderator

Andrew Thomas: 01 Mar 2016 5:38:20pm No. Infact, Dove was on the mark. Turnbull is a man of ambition and his actions underline why ambition is not considered a virtue. But Turnbull is not responsible for what happened to the NBN, he just did what he thought was best for his career aspirations, though this may turn out to be part of his undoing (naked ambition usual ends up destroying a person). However, we are all responsible for what happened to the NBN because we are all responsible for the politics that occurs in our nation. Such is the reality of being in a democracy. The electorate pays for its stupidity in the end. Alert moderator

the yank: 01 Mar 2016 6:41:35pm "But Turnbull is not responsible for what happened to the NBN, he just did what he thought was best for his career aspirations" ... and what he thought best to do was a failure. How can you blame anything or anyone else the buck stops at his desk. Alert moderator

Andrew Thomas: 01 Mar 2016 11:06:48pm Hi the yank, Turnbull wasn't thinking about the NBN. He was thinking about his own interests in a political context. While this might seem counter-intuitive to you and I, it makes perfect sense when you're a political animal with ambition (this is why programs such as "Yes Minister", "Utopia" and "Hollowmen" are successful - they are very close to documentaries). However, Turnbull's ambition got the better of him the first time he led the LNP, and now as PM he appears to be heading for a very similar train smash, having made a "deal with the devil" (the ultra-conservative fringe mob that is also the dominant faction in the LNP) that may be his final and permanent undoing. While some may celebrate such an outcome, it may see Australia generate its own Donald Trump. Alert moderator

walga: 01 Mar 2016 7:30:05pm One of the things that also contributes to the NBN failure is Turnbull giving the main job to Ziggy, a mate of the Liberals. Ziggy did nothing for Telstra when he was the boss there. They should have kept the competent board that was already in place. Alert moderator

peterjim: 02 Mar 2016 2:46:56am Abbott's was the primary fault. But you are correct i laying blame at Turnbull's door. What he did was comply with Abbott's stupidity to ensure he was in place to oust the monk when the time came. Unfortunately Turnbull has either been so tied down by Abbott's legacy and supporters that he can change nothing, or he is as Howard says just another version of Abbott with a different presentation style. Either way a disaster for NBN and many other things. And yes, we are all responsible for this mess in that we sit back and let the money men behind the news media dictate the play; all they play with is news bites and scandal, never any analysis or questioning of politicians' and bureaucracy's motives and actions. Alert moderator

Luke: 02 Mar 2016 7:53:55am Uh, nice try. This is the fault of the Coalition and their supporters only. Alert moderator

Steve: 02 Mar 2016 8:55:23am Under Labor, we had contractors pulling up fibre they had recently installed because they weren't being paid, subcontractors going broke, doing work at less than cost, and all of the WA and NT installation plan stalled when the government pulled the contractors off the job. Communications between the NBNCo and the main contractors was ad hoc at best. The whole project was a shambles. Sure, there are problems with what the current government has done with the project, but it was a basket case when they won power. Alert moderator

Leigh: 01 Mar 2016 6:12:38pm Rubbish. Labors plan was grossly underfunded. How much more do you think it would cost to dig up millions of footpaths, where there is no conduit, only direct buried cable. Even without the extra work of having to dig up every ones driveways, it's still costing more than Labor original estimate. We are too small a country population wise, in too big a geographic area to fund such a grand project. The government should have invested in dense 5G instead. Alert moderator

the yank: 01 Mar 2016 6:43:18pm Seems some still hold onto not the typical LNP refrain. Nothing is the fault of the LNP. Is there ever going to be a time when the LNP take responsibility for their actions or inactions? Alert moderator

rockpicker: 01 Mar 2016 10:25:32pm Never, ever. Alert moderator

Bob G : 01 Mar 2016 11:29:24pm High time the Labor losers took the blame for the mess they handed to Australia with vote catching reckless spending as every Labor Government has done since Whitlam rose to power. The opposition mostly Union Delegates are not fit to be in opposition and really do not deserve the Loyalty their followers demonstrate. They and their previous ilk created Australia's current black hole but are not prepared to let or help others begin the repair. Labor is all about Labor NOT Australia or Australians Alert moderator

the yank: 02 Mar 2016 8:05:39am In power two and a half years and still the LNP aren't responsible for anything. No policies, no tax reform, no NBN, higher unemployment, higher debt, just the promise of a lot of money placed on "black", spend big on defence. Alert moderator

Ashigaru: 02 Mar 2016 2:01:08pm Bob G, you are incorrect. Howard and Costello created Australia's current mess with their squandering of over three hundred billion dollars on vote buying, as well as privatising income-generating assets, selling off publicly owned assets for a tiny fraction of their value, and introducing massive structural deficit with their overly generous tax cuts and other welfare for the wealthy. Please use facts rather than partisan rants. Alert moderator

Kevin: 02 Mar 2016 3:31:33pm Fact- Labor inherited the 10th best economy in the world from Howard (who was by far the most wasteful and biggest spending government in Australia's history) and when Abbott won power in 2013 we had the best economy in the world. Fact- The average spending of the current Abbott/ Turnbull/? government as a percentage GDP (the only logical way to calculate it) is higher than the average spending of the Rudd and Gillard governments. This is even worse when you consider the average spending of Rudd and Gillard was blown out by the very necessary stimulus spend that kept us out of recession and hundreds of thousands in jobs. Despite this the current rabble are bigger spenders although nobody comes close to the wastefulness of the Howard years. The lie most the public believe is that the coalition are better economic managers but the facts prove Labor are far better economic managers. Alert moderator

Lamptable: 02 Mar 2016 2:03:19pm What many comments here do not address is the cost pf connection to NBN.Under Labor mine was FREE under the Libs it could cost many thousands of dollars depending on how far from the node you live Alert moderator

Andrew Thomas: 01 Mar 2016 6:47:46pm Hi Leigh, You're entitled to your opinion, but the vast majority of non-political / technical experts disagree with you (most of them). So, unless you've can give us a reason why we should trust you over them, you're just coming across as one of many partisan posters that make no real arguments worth noting. Alert moderator

Tags: 02 Mar 2016 7:47:37am Hi Andrew, Compression rates via mobile continue to improve with absolute speed and overall throughput continuing go up to levels that would/should/could have been sufficient for those harder to reach areas if Australia without laying tens of thousands of miles of cable. Also helps that a large portion of Australia is as flat as a pancake and as such signal waves can travel quite a distance before a mobile repeater station is required - curvature of the earth stuff! I seem to remember at least one Telco offering this up by putting in stations along the main highways of the interior. Didn't get far with either the blue or red pollies. As someone else pointed out running 1Gbps fibre in a densely populated and geographically small country (like the UK, France, Italy et all) is an entirely different proposition (technically and financially) to implementing in Australia. I don't see the likes of Russia trying to do this east of the Urals ... as one example. And I promote the "5G solution" as someone who lives in area that is not even on the NBN roll out map, so I'm not expecting any improvement over my scratchy, alexander graham bell copper wire technology, ex-Telstra network that can't even support skype or maintain a stable citrix connection to my head office in Sydney because of the amount of noise on the line ... and I live a massive 40 kms from the centre of Sydney CBD 300 meters from the (only) main road highway north to Queensland!! Alert moderator

Rae: 02 Mar 2016 10:11:00am I wonder how the Apple/Alphabet satellite plan is proceeding? I'd say they might finish first and all our problems solved. Alert moderator

Nick: 02 Mar 2016 12:24:35pm The cost of stringing fiber above ground to link population centers is trivial and can almost certainly be done by using the existing powerline rights of way and physical infrastructure. Joining geographically disparate areas via microwave links is not practicable. Microwaves are susceptible to interference from any number of sources. A fiber link is the cheapest way to link long distances assuming you wish to have significant bandwidth. The high cost of fiber connection comes in connecting within the cities where you have conflicting rights of way and other limitations in what you can and cannot do and for which you have to pay. A high portion of the fiber will be able to be laid in existing channels; only some will require digging up roads and driveways. It would not be correct to suggest that everything has to be dug up and that this is where the huge cost is. Of course laying fiber like this is expensive and tedious, but so is attempting to get completely different networks to integrate with each other as we now have evidence of. We can leave discussion of costs for rehabilitation of a decrepit and decayed copper network for another time... Once fiber is in place, it acts exactly like any other infrastructure, similar to a road for example. People find hundreds of ways to use a road for their benefit. These benefits happen because the road was built, but are not generally quantifiable before the road is there. Possibly one of the things that fiber infrastructure could be used for would be data back haul (for those who don't know what data back haul is, Dr Google can help). Right now any new mobile connectivity requires upfront investment in back haul bandwidth (or being held hostage to existing telco's and renting theirs), which is a significant barrier to entry. With fiber running everywhere, it does not take much imagination to think of new 5G entrants into the mobile data and VOIP market using 5G technology (which is much cheaper than 3G and does not require the large towers that the original mobile networks needed) and using the NBN for back haul. This would hopefully result in a mobile data price war which could benefit everyone who is not an Optus or Telstra shareholder. Whilst the above may not happen, there will be many other ways that the infrastructure will be used and just because someone cannot list and quantify them today does not mean they do not exist. A financial analysis that assumes only the existing users will continue to use it would be incorrect and hugely undervalue the asset created. The cost of doing the NBN properly would always have been worth it in the long run. It is incredibly disappointing that such a crucial piece of infrastructure became hostage to partisan politics instead of receiving the support from everyone it required. This is what we have allowed our politicians to bring us to and it is reflected in the many comments here tha Alert moderator

Ashigaru: 02 Mar 2016 2:06:13pm @Tags, with the relatively high latency Australia already experiences due to our distance form the rest of the world, we do not need the additional latency that wireless systems invariable introduce. Fibre rollout is necessary, at least in our most densely populated areas - the cities, where around 90% of our population live anyway. Wireless would be suitable for regional areas where compromises have to be made for economic reasons but it would be terrible idea for built up areas. Alert moderator

Peter: 01 Mar 2016 7:21:04pm This policy is exactly the same as being implemented in the UK. FTTN and later extend to premises when justified. I am on the NBN and 12 mps are fine for me .Can stream videos on netflix and download what I want. I mostly work from home as a business advisor and my service is totally satisfactoryI can increase speed if I want to pay a higher price. The claim that the FTTP option is cheaper is such garbage. To spend $3000 to dig up a garden to connect to the premises for people who will never sign up to the high speed service, if any at all for many of the 4 million people on welfare of some kind Also the claim that Gillard once made about it enabling old people to consult their doctor on line and avoid visiting a doctor is also garbage, particularly if they don't have a computer. Alert moderator

deliah: 01 Mar 2016 7:50:43pm Garden doesn't get dug up! in Darwin. NBN all comes through in the Telephone cable ducts for single houses. It went along the Telstra manholes in the street then under my concrete driveway to a new box on the side of the house. No digging. Neat. But then the inside boxes are large and you need to think about where to put them, right next to a power plug and what bit of furniture they can be hid behind. It was neat for me but very ugly for a friend in a townhouse/terrace. They just ran the cables along the wall from 2 storey terracehouse to house above the front doors. Not along the phone cable. Alert moderator

Jeff: 01 Mar 2016 9:53:21pm Your arguments have all been disproved before, but here goes: You are a sample size of one. I work from home in content creation and I couldn't do my job nearly as effectively without the 40Mbit uploads, thousands of small businesses are in the same boat. Agile economy and all that... You are comparing apples with tadpoles... The UK FTTN rollout was started years ago by an incumbent looking to sweat the last profits out of an almost dead network. The UK is now moving to a FTTP rollout due to insufficient bandwidth. In AU we have bought a copper network which (conservatively speaking) has been neglected for well over 15 years, likely much longer. There is a massive amount of remediation and ongoing costs (telstra have previously stated almost $1b/yr - thats just for analog voice services, which are barely susceptible to interference) to maintain. FTTP: Spend $3000 to lay the fibre, make sure that the FIC connectors are clean and *that is it*. Unless a backhoe cuts the cable you are going to have very few infrastructure problems as it is passive technology going right back to the "exchange" (i.e: no routers/hubs/powered equipment). FTTN: Spend a little less to connect the property at the node. Pay per year to provide power to the node. Pay regularl y to replace the backup batteries in the nodes. Pay regularly to maintain the copper, much more than now, as VDSL is more susceptible to interference/water ingress. Pay more to run THREE backend provisioning/assurance systems (FTTP/FTTN/HFC) which is an absolute nightmare to maintain. backhaul for the FTTN network is also being underprovisioned - this will come back to bite them. And lastly, how many old people do you know who do not own a computer now? Sure there are a few out there but they are absolutely the minority. Regardless, the original claim was about freeing up hospital beds, as you can send anyone (not just old people) home with cheap monitoring equipment. It plugs straight into the NTD, no computer needed... Better health outcomes at less cost, and something which absolutely cannot be done on FTTN, as FTTN is inherently unstable. Alert moderator

Outback: 01 Mar 2016 10:38:59pm Sorry Peter. I don't understand how it can be cheaper to firstly build a FTTN network and then secondly build a FTTP network afterwards (as you inevitably have to do as data usage increases), when you could have built the FTTP network first-up. Would it have made sense to build a 2-lane Sydney Harbour Bridge first, only to upgrade it to a wider bridge some decades later? Of course not. Or would it have made sense to lay a 6-inch gas pipeline 1400km to Sydney in the 1970's only to go back and lay a second pipeline, 34-inch in diameter, 20 years later? Again: of course not. Digging holes is some of the most expensive and dangerous work you can do, so you do it once, only. I can imagine only one good reason to lay FTTP and it holds equally true in the UK as it does here: you do it to deliberately build a slower network, generally unable to stream video reliably, and thus protect the commercial interests of the pay TV companies who have invested in satellite and cable technology. FTTN is fast enough to give a reliable channel that bypasses the pay TV infrastructure; FTTP simply isn't fast enough. And who has the biggest interest in pay TV? Rupert Murdoch of course, and it's no accident his media empire was solidly backing Tony Abbott. Alert moderator

Snoopy: 01 Mar 2016 11:34:36pm It is also rediculous that they would drive to the local shop if they did not have a motor vehicle. Your point is? Alert moderator

Jason: 02 Mar 2016 5:00:20am Peter, that's great that 12Mbs is fast enough for you. You know what? It's fast enough for me, too. But we shouldn't be spending $50 billion building something that's good enough for you and me for the next five or ten years. We should be building something that's good enough for everyone for the next eighty years. P.S. You do know that they can run fibre optic cable from the utility poles? Not everyone needs to have their garden dug up. We have FttP running to our house from the pole out front. It took the men about an hour to install... Alert moderator

ardy: 02 Mar 2016 8:21:07am If we all had access to 12mb with upgrades over the years with construction following demand we might have a system. As it is we are building something very few want or need today but might want tomorrow. Taking a stab at what the world will be using in 10 or 20 years in terms of technology is either bold or stupid and I don't know which we are, both most probably. The money would have been better spent on our water supply lines and sewage disposal. At least that technology should not change over the next 50 years. They are certainly in need of upgrading. Alert moderator

carn: 02 Mar 2016 2:06:41pm Wrong. The technology is what saved New York from collapse after Hurricane Sandy. People need to realize Fibre is for the long term not the baby boomers who are now settling down in their retirement home. Be a liberal please not a conservative when it comes to technology. Alert moderator

walga: 01 Mar 2016 7:25:19pm Wireless broadband will always have more limitations than optic fibre. Whilst wireless is good it is not feasible for all Internet services into the future. Alert moderator

GreyBags: 01 Mar 2016 9:10:06pm The Coalition is digging up exactly the same places but putting in new copper. Alert moderator

Cyn: 01 Mar 2016 9:22:49pm " We are too small a country population wise, in too big a geographic area to fund such a grand project." No we are too small a country population wise, in too big a geographic area for the private sector fund such a grand project of it's own accord. Government's can pay for things private companies won't because government's are non profit organisations and can accept lower returns on invest in purely monetary terms than a company's shareholders will accept. the main limits on the scale of what a government can finance being the state of it's finances, the availability of credit willing to be loaned to the government and for economic infrastructure (being done by a reasonably honest government) any sort of positive return on investment in a cost benefit analysis of the project. Alert moderator

Grey: 02 Mar 2016 8:36:45am Cyn, perhaps you really mean that governments can blow away taxpayers money on more frivolous projects than what our basic needs are and then have every taxpayer well into the future paying hefty interest on borrowed money. Companies will identify markets that will create a return on investment and that's the way it ought to be, users market paying for what users want to use and not every taxpayer suffering. Alert moderator

Cyn: 02 Mar 2016 12:24:56pm "perhaps you really mean that governments can blow away taxpayers money on more frivolous projects than what our basic needs are and then have every taxpayer well into the future paying hefty interest on borrowed money" Not at all, I the comment you replied to was meant neither a a for or against the NBN itself, although I am heavily for the FTTP NBN plan Labor had to be rolled out and grudgingly for the current mixed technology FTTN ugly duckling package as the best plan still on the table. What I did mean with that comment is that comment though is that any government project (lets say a bridge over a river for example) with even a minuscule return on investment after accounting for financing costs and inflation can't be considered a waste of money or a financial failure because GOVERNMENT IS NOT A FOR PROFIT BUSINESS and if private citizens of businesses or even other government departments, project or whatever else use the end result of the initial project to increase their productivity (by using the bridge to cross the river and save time, fuel, shortening the route ect.) then it would be a net positive.Should governments go for project with higher a return on investment, all else being equal yes they should if only to be able to reinvest into other projects more quickly. The other point I was trying to make was that Australia is not a minuscule nation, sure we have a rather small population for our geographic size but our economy is quite large and we are more than capable of financing a project of this size if the largest participant in our economy (the Federal Government) is doing most of the initial financing. Part of any governments role is to provide services that will benefit the entire community that the private sector cannot or will not provide so long as the government in question are able to provide said service. Alert moderator

graazt: 02 Mar 2016 1:30:32pm I'd agree that there's something now that's a bit fishy about the taxpayer underwriting the risk of major infrastructure projects, for the private sector then to eagerly buy them if they come good. But, wealth-enabling infrastructure is more than just return on investment for the owner. Just because the private sector didn't take the risks (and why would you if you have the market sewn up already), doesn't mean it's not a good thing for our competitiveness or economic potential for this work to be done. People who think capacity and throughput in our digital networks is somehow frivolous aren't paying attention to what our competitors and trading partners are up to. The Sydney Harbor bridge was called a frivilous waste by many in the 30 years it took to get the political will to actually build it from when the idea was floated. At least they built it with plenty of throughput (ultimately not enough of course, but still a damn sight more forward thinking than the present numbskulls). Alert moderator

geggyg: 02 Mar 2016 2:10:01am Don't forget that much of the funding for Labors NBN was to be commercial and it was to be privatised when finished , unlike the Abbott/Turnbull which is now funded primarily through the budget , and with the lower speeds it will deliver will have lower revenue making it almost impossible for it to return the govt funding let alone make a profit for the govt. Alert moderator

Grey: 02 Mar 2016 8:40:51am " much of the funding for Labors NBN was to be commercial " Never ever forget all of Labor's promises, especially how they will fund from forward estimates that go awfully awry. Very little of initial funding was to be commercial and hence the multi billion price tag and as for Labor then selling off the NBN, only companies that could see a profit and rising profits would be interested and then what do you expect would happen to connection charges to create rising profits? Alert moderator

Jerry Attrick: 02 Mar 2016 8:20:31am Gosh! Stuff would have needed upgrading! Who would have thought that a totally new, high-speed internet would require that? So instead, lets cobble together a hybrid of old and new. That ought to be good enough for Australians. Alert moderator

v: 02 Mar 2016 11:44:25am yank, "Closer to the mark Turnbull." Even closer: Murdoch and his Foxtel monopoly. Had the Liberal Party's sponsors wanted a functional national telecommunications network, Turnbull's job would not have been, in Abbott's words, to "dismantle the NBN". Turnbull merely carried out the tasks assigned to him, as he did with the ARM and the yes case for the Republic Referrendum. Turnbull wanted a parachute ride into a safe seat, Howard wanted the republican cause sabotaged. Turnbull was the man for the job. Turnbull wanted to restore himself in Rupert's good books and regain the leadership of the Liberal Party, Murdoch wanted the NBN wrecked to remove a threat to his Foxtel monopoly. Turnbull wa the man for the job. With different sponsors, we would see a very different Malcolm Turnbull. As always with the Liberal Party, you get what you pay for. Alert moderator

magb1: 02 Mar 2016 12:12:25pm Yes Yank, we need to speak to Malcolm about what went wrong - deliberately sabotaged a great innovation simply because Labor introduced it. How wicked is that? Alert moderator

Paul01: 01 Mar 2016 3:55:34pm "What went wrong?" The NBN was a threat to pay TV, pay TV supports Murdoch's newspapers and politicians dance to the tune Murdoch's papers play. Tony Abbott then decided to gain brownies with Rupert by spruiking how bad the NBN was. Lying of course. Tony won and told Mal [who invented the internet] to destroy the NBN. Mal did as instructed and it probably the only thing Mal has done since the LNP won power. As usual the taxpayer will pick up the tab. Alert moderator

Storm: 01 Mar 2016 4:24:34pm This ^. Once gaining power, Malcolm should have disavowed Tony's Murdoch/Foxtel-saving policy, and put Australia back on track to Fibre to the Home. He could easily have said "Tony made me do it" or "following further consultation/experiences, we have decided that it's better to go FTTH after all, as Fibre to the Node is nowhere near as cost effective or practical, especially with all the recurrent costs of powering and maintaining the nodes"). I would have had a lot of respect for that honest approach. As it is, Malcolm seems a prisoner of Tony Abbot's cronies. If he gets elected in July, those same cronies may decide to replace Malcolm with Tony again. I wouldn't be surprised. Alert moderator

Jay Somasundaram: 01 Mar 2016 5:41:22pm Yes. I fell for FTN - it seemed to make economic sense and believed FTH being boys wanting the latest toys..... But it should have been reasonably clear to Turnbull soon after the election. We should have a class action against Turnbull, Abbot and the Coalition (no point suing the government since it'll just mean that we are paying out of our taxes). But it raises a real question - does Turnbull have the competence to run the whole government if he can't run a single project? Alert moderator

Benny Wormtongue: 01 Mar 2016 6:23:16pm Hi Jay. Your honesty is commendable and you are not alone in falling for the coalition fttn network before the 2013 election. It was very clear to see for those not a part of the Labor feeding frenzy prior to the election that Turnbull's nbn is a dud. Within a week of winning the election those most affected by the coalitions dud nbn submitted the biggest online petition in Australian history (at the time) to Turnbull calling on him to scrap fttn and continue with Labor's ftth. Turnbull scoffed as though he really believes he invented the internet. The free ride needs to be over for Turnbull and the coalition. They have done nothing and have never had a plan worth supporting. Turnbull has had 6 years in opposition and 2 1/2 years in government to form a tax policy and he has the gall to tell Australians and the media not to rush them. 8 1/2 years and no policies from the Liberals is plenty enough reason for Australians not to make the same mistake at the ballot box in 2016. Alert moderator

Wanderer: 01 Mar 2016 9:33:13pm Ftth is cheaper and quicker to install. What is ridiculous is that neither side thought about only connecting the areas that would use it the most. They could have tried a silicon valley in gellong, western sydney or elsewhere. Instead they thought demand vorresponded to the marginality of political seats. The stuff up of the nbn was in its thought bubble. No party ever had a chance of installing it to budget. Alert moderator

Jess : 02 Mar 2016 11:38:26am Each state and territory had crews. In my juristriction they started with the areas that had the poorest internet, that weren't meeting todays needs, they have continued with this system If the goal is to have everyone on a base level of services we will give this a score of 100 in 2020. The majority of people are currently on levels of 60-80 and hence services are geared to work at this level. However there are a bunch of people on levels 20-30. So the people are improving services for the people on 20-30 to 100 - Which means that people on 20-30 can now use the services that are already available. What people are suggesting to upgrade the people on 60-80 be upgraded first despite them being able to most things now and all the services being geared to them whereas it will improve the lower scores in more tangible ways. Alert moderator

Mossman Mal: 02 Mar 2016 1:51:54pm Ftth is way cheaper in the long run as when they finish fttp it will need to be upgraded as the copper is outdated and seriously decayed to the point that some of the copper is already being replaced so your assumption are based on false economies Alert moderator

Jerry Attrick: 02 Mar 2016 8:32:29am "He could easily have said "Tony made me do it"" No, whoever was pulling Tony's strings made Turnbull do it. None of these guys have control. It's the gremlins in the Liberal party who have control. That's why Abbott's first budget was farcical, his second budget... wasn't a budget... and Turnbull's budget, should it be revealed before an election, will either be a "please re-elect us" budget, or will follow similar lines to Abbott's and result in the coalition being disintegrated into thousands of small, inept, mumbling, particles. Alert moderator

Sir Robert of Lindsay: 01 Mar 2016 4:40:01pm "The NBN was a threat to pay TV, pay TV supports Murdoch's newspapers and politicians dance to the tune Murdoch's papers play." Nailed it. This was Abbott's clear intention with getting Malcolm to sabotage the NBN in the manner he did. He made sure it wouldn't be too great a threat to Fox, made sure there would be massive cost blow outs they would try and stitch Labor up for, and they did it knowingly and willfully, despite the hit it would have on tax payers money. If ever we needed more proof the LNP are irresponsible economic managers, well here it is. One thing the last two years has shown the nation is the LNP consider the tax take their plaything. Wasting money to fund witch hunts, destroying future revenue sources, even helicopter joy rides and tax payer funded wedding attendances. Alert moderator

Jerry Attrick: 02 Mar 2016 8:38:33am As much as I'm inclined to question the motivation behind conspiracy theories, Sir Robert, I'm forced to agree that this one is a credible proposal. Rupert has been the power behind the Liberal throne for a long time, for that very obvious reason: his own financial and emotional security. Any ideological component is derived from his need to remain the world's most powerful paper-boy. Alert moderator

John: 01 Mar 2016 5:14:59pm Rubbish. It had nothing to do with your bogey-man Murdoch. The NBN was a junk idea from day one. Turnbull's NBN Mk2 is simply cheaper junk than Conroy's NBN Mk1 junk. On a recent visit to Japan people were telling me that 3G services were so old fashioned that hardly anybody remembered them. 4G is tolerable, 5G is the buzz service right now and the real enthusiasts are looking forward to 6G. Australia doesn't need and doesn't want cables in trenches. What is needed (and what will very shortly be so imperative that without it we'll become a third world economy) is a vastly expanded wireless network. With the latest technology we could cover Australia, even out to the most remote inland areas with comparatively few towers, and at a minute fraction of the cost of the NBN - and we are going to have to do that anyway when these hungry devices become the norm. And you might care to look up "stratellites". Alert moderator

Ron of the valley: 01 Mar 2016 5:38:57pm > With the latest technology we could cover Australia, even out to > the most remote inland areas with comparatively few towers, and at > a minute fraction of the cost of the NBN Wireless does not have the bandwidth to carry anything but a tiny fraction of internet traffic. Alert moderator

Benny Wormtongue: 01 Mar 2016 6:42:00pm Ron. Of course you are right and Turnbull knows it, he just hopes enough people don't know it so he gets re-elected. Alert moderator

John: 02 Mar 2016 1:10:29pm You are wrong, Ron. The present generation stratellites will: 1. Service an area of 300,000 square-miles; 2. Provide two way high speed broad-band data communication; 3. Provide high speed-broad-band access even in the remotest areas; 4. For a country the size of Australia two or three stratellites are enough instead of thousands of towers and hundreds of thousands of kilometres of trenches. In the USA planning shows that three such devices will supply service to an area stretching from the Yukon to the Gulf of Mexico. And this is based on 2009 technology. The technology is changing by quantum leaps. Alert moderator

Blzbob: 01 Mar 2016 5:41:17pm The towers do exactly what John? For the data to get from one tower to the next, or from one tower to a tower on the other side of the world, it uses fibre optic, cables in trenches. You surely don't think it is relayed from tower to tower all the way around the world do you? Alert moderator

Wanderer: 01 Mar 2016 9:39:13pm Dont we have oceans around Australia? How exactly does data get from Australia to America? Satellites. So the air is either the slowest part of the trasmission journey meaning we wont slow it down further with more satellites or a quick approach. The most effective way would be wireless signals from the device straight to a satellite that goes to its destination. Alert moderator

Sir Robert of LIndsay: 02 Mar 2016 6:14:00am "Don't we have oceans around Australia? How exactly does data get from Australia to America? Satellites. "

Yes. And No. SOME data traffic gets sent by satellite, but only a very small amount. Most traffic comes in via submerged ocean cables. Originally copper, most have been replaced with FOC. Australia has at least 12 major submarine FOCs, linked via Asia and the Pacific region into north and south America. Do a search for "international fibre optic cable routes" and you'll get a link to a map. Last night I was video conferencing with a supplier in France. It was like we were in the same room. Satellite delays can be many seconds and are very noticeable. Just to get a single up and back takes nearly a whole second. Before that single can be sent it has to be packaged, once it reaches the satellite it has to be routed, and then when it gets back to earth it has to be read and sent where it needs to go, adding more seconds to the transfer. Just looking at one of the data packages he sent me was 4Mb, the transfer was almost instaneous. If that had been coming in via satellite I'd still be waiting for it. Alert moderator

Jerry Attrick: 02 Mar 2016 8:40:53am Thanks for that suggestion Sir Bob. Interesting map! Alert moderator

Blzbob: 02 Mar 2016 8:25:28am "How exactly does data get from Australia to America? " Most of the data moves via the two undersea fibre optic cables. Satellites are expensive to install and replace and do not have the capacity off the undersea cables. Alert moderator

Mossman Mal: 02 Mar 2016 1:55:00pm wanderer there is already fibre optic cables layed across the ocean do some research before making false staments Alert moderator

Mark Andrews: 02 Mar 2016 3:41:11pm Almost all data gets to Australia over submarine cables which these days are fibre based cables often using optical amplifiers driven by lasers sent down a second fibre. Very little gets sent via satellites. Geostationary satellites introduce a 400ms delay. Ask the Pacific island nations that aren't on a cable route about that. If they could afford to lay the cable to themselves they would do that in a instant. Alert moderator

LegendLength: 01 Mar 2016 5:44:46pm Don't worry. In 30 years time everyone will use wireless and the billions spent on the NBN will be forgotten about. Alert moderator

Rhino: 01 Mar 2016 6:04:05pm Because all those wireless devices connect directly to each other don't they.... Oh, yeah, they use the wired network. Alert moderator

LegendLength: 01 Mar 2016 6:28:11pm NBN and the backbone are two extremely different things Alert moderator

joey: 01 Mar 2016 7:05:17pm I still dont get why people are spouting the unforeseeable potential of wireless when there is already a strong technology in existence. Now it's been a while since my basic physics class but the speed of concentrated light over glass seems a touch more reliable - future wise - than the speed of radio and microwaves through hills, trees and bricks. Alert moderator

LegendLength: 01 Mar 2016 8:17:48pm How many times a month do you need more than 4G speed? It's a luxury that we are paying billions for. How confident are you that wireless has reached it speed limit and won't get 10, 100, or a thousand times faster over the next few decades? I'm not doubting the speed of fiber is way higher than wireless. But speed is only a part of the full equation, which is total cost to lay the infrastructure vs pubic benefit gained (it is tax payers money after all, unlike the 4G networks). Alert moderator

Peter: 01 Mar 2016 10:22:33pm Yes. I don't know much about the physics but personal experience suggests you'll have trouble beating optic fibre over time. I live in Japan and recently upgraded a 128Mbps line to 1Gbps. All that was needed was a change on the provider side. We even use the same optic fibre modem that we've been using for about eight years. There's now a carrier that offers 10Gbps in limited areas for about 120AUD a month (1Gpbs is fairly standard). I'll get that as soon as my carrier offers which I doubt will be too long. My understanding from this is that once you have a good fibre network installed then the sky's the limit. The thing that does limit my connection speed is using wireless, which knocks it back to a theoretical max of about 50Mbps I think. Alert moderator

spacey 101: 01 Mar 2016 11:57:50pm Dear joey, you are absolutely correct. What posters like LegendLength above have to explain to us is how wireless can carry the same amount of information in as quick a time as fibre optics (to give them a clue fibre optics cables due to their material and the way the light bounces down it move information at the speed of light minus 30%, though recent experiments using different materials have actually clocked these speeds at 99.7% of the speed of light!!). Let me make one fact absolutely clear from the beginning: Despite what they may have read from certain clueless commentators, there is not a single country or telecommunications company anywhere in the World that is attempting to replace fixed networks with wireless in urban areas, or even planning to do so in the future. The concise explanation for this is as follows: 1. Physical limitations prevent practical wireless speeds from approaching those available over fibre-optic cables. 2. There is insufficient radio spectrum to allow wireless to replace fixed networks. 3. To even PARTIALLY overcome the above limitations, we would need to build over 75,000 new mobile transmission towers across Australia. 4. Wireless network connections are prohibitively expensive, typically being 3-4 times more expensive, for less data volume and at a much slower speed. Just look at how much it cost for a gig of data on your phone plan vs a gig of data through the proper NBN. My mobile phone provider charges me around $5 per gig. I have unlimited broadband at home for about $60 a month. Getting the picture yet?? As it currently stands, fibreoptics are achieving speeds that are 250,000 times faster than wireless. Fibre can carry 69,000 times more data than the entire bandwidth delivered by a wireless tower! People who argue that wireless is the future simply need goat fend some physics classes. Alert moderator

Brennets: 02 Mar 2016 12:45:07am Having worked on the mobile towers construction biz, each tower is extremely expensive to build, service and power. If the ac in equipment sheds fail in summer the circuitry burns, tower goes dead, like in a computer with bad cooling fan. They only have limited user capacity, ie a tower can only accept a finite number of users at any given time. If more people use wireless internet per tower you all get less download speed/bandwidth. I would take 100mps cable over wireless internet as an option every time. Alert moderator

Paul01: 02 Mar 2016 8:18:06am We have wireless broadband, we are in direct line of sight of the tower and only about 250 meters away, the tech guy said it was the best signal he had seen. We were early adopters and had 47mbs down and about 10mbs up, this has halved since others have connected and we live in a town with about 1000 people living in it. People living as little as 5km away have line of sight issues and are stuck on the copper network for the foreseeable future. This is a dry land farming area, it is pretty flat apart from a few rolling hills. What we have now is about as good as it will get, 20 years from now there may be some increase in speeds due to wireless tech upgrades but what speeds will folks on fiber be getting in 20 years? I see the wireless towers as a waste of money. Do it once, do it right. Alert moderator

Blzbob: 01 Mar 2016 10:13:50pm The fibre optic they were installing is the backbone of the future. Alert moderator

hassa: 01 Mar 2016 7:36:32pm Legend, Ask the Japanese about wireless when the tsunami hit and everyone wanted to use their mobile phones , it is stopgap , and when foes want to invade or disrupt a country , they just block the signals , so will we go back to smoke signals then will we? Alert moderator

Outback: 01 Mar 2016 10:44:20pm Except that the laws of physics won't have changed in 30 years and the amount of radio spectrum won't have increased in that time. Fiber optic cable at 100Mbits/sec, on the other hand, is operating at a tiny fraction of its theoretical bandwidth, only limited by the technology packed into the terminal equipment. Alert moderator

Chas: 01 Mar 2016 8:55:08pm No John...that is not how wireless works. Wireless is an excellent technology, but it can't come close to replacing fixed internet. And broadband is probably the most profitable infrastructure project a country can undertake. According to all accepted economic modelling, everytime you double broadband speed for a country, you increase that country's GDP by .3%... In our case, that is $5 Billion/year for each doubling. We are currently at an average speed of 6Mbps, so what do you think 1Gbit would do for the country? Alert moderator

eyeffess: 01 Mar 2016 10:15:07pm If satellites are so good why is the world's communication conducted overwhelmingly via optical fibre? Alert moderator

Mick: 01 Mar 2016 11:02:25pm Why do people still keep parroting on about wireless being the solution. IT ISN'T. Wireless is a broadcast technology. Every node in range gets the signal, ever signal has to be separated from each other to be decoded. Take this easy to understand analogy. If you have 2 people in a room having a conversation, things are easy, there is no cross talk and everyone can hear clearly what is being said. Double that to 4 and things get a little more chaotic, there is difficulty hearing what you want to hear over the entirety of the conversations occurring. Take it to 10 people and it gets worse and it continues to get worse the more and more people talking at once. Increase that to EVERYONE living in your area and it just won't work. Ever tried sending a text or phone call at the end of a big event at a stadium, it's next to impossible, that's usually even with phone tower coverage at stadiums being more robust than elsewhere. Fibre and other physical transmission media are point to point and don't have this issue. So repeat after me, wireless is NOT the solution. Alert moderator

Sir Robert of LIndsay: 02 Mar 2016 5:56:38am "Rubbish. It had nothing to do with your bogey-man Murdoch. The NBN was a junk idea from day one. Turnbull's NBN Mk2 is simply cheaper junk than Conroy's NBN Mk1 junk." "Australia doesn't need and doesn't want cables in trenches. What is needed (and what will very shortly be so imperative that without it we'll become a third world economy) is a vastly expanded wireless network. " The worst thing about this post is the worry this amount of ill-informed non-sense may possibly change your vote. You obviously don't understand the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound. You obviously don't understand the limitation of band width that wireless will NEVER be able to overcome, and you obviously don't understand the idea that REAL work isn't actually done on a smart phone. I work as a CAD operator. If we were to rely on wireless bandwidth to send files we would go broke in a week. We aren't sending facebook cat videos on our fancy new IPhone6, people do REAL work on broadband and need REAL carrying capacity. A capacity wireless will NEVER be able to get near compared to FOC. This isn't a technological limitation we will overcome at some time in the future, although it may be improved slightly. It's actually cold hard physics that restrict the capacity of wireless. Alert moderator

Paul01: 02 Mar 2016 8:06:05am John, Stratellites are literally pie in the sky stuff. How many are operational today? Fiber is the future. Alert moderator

Rich: 02 Mar 2016 10:36:18am John, Japan doesn't have production 5G. Their fastest networks are 4G just like ours. You also appear to have missed that NBN(co) has already provided satellite coverage across Australia, and that NBN have already installed hundreds of Wireless (LTE) towers. The suggestion that we should use those wireless solutions exclusively to provide lower costs is laughable because the aggregate bandwidth provided by the new NBN satellites for a couple of $billion can be provided in urban areas for one tenth of the cost by using LTE .. and for one hundredth of the cost by using GPON (Fibre.) In addition to the setup costs, in the future the Fibre can be cheaply upgraded to provide increased bandwidth (EG move from GPON to XGPON), the wireless towers will be expensive to add bandwidth to, and the satellite basically impossible.

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John: 02 Mar 2016 1:25:15pm Rich, I agree that Japan does not have "production" 5G and that 4G is the norm. But 5G devices are on the market, the enthusiasts are buying them and everyone is anticipating a full roll out in the very near future, and technology and infrastructure are being adapted to cater accordingly. 6G is what gets the tech-heads excited, and the push behind it seems to be unstoppable - and it won't be too far into the future I'd guess. In any event, the hunger of these devices is incremental, and we have absolutely no way of avoiding that. We will be compelled to install appropriate technology to service 4G, 5G and later 6G devices. We cannot avoid that demand. We might as well do it in time instead of late and in addition to other facilities. Alert moderator

graazt: 02 Mar 2016 1:40:00pm Yeah, Japan's wireless network runs off an extensive fibre backbone. South Korea, who have been heavily involved in the development of 5G likewise have plenty of fibre laying around. You realise it's not out there yet and won't be for at least a couple of years. Who's talking about 6G? For such a technophile you seem to be backing a 2nd world Australia. We'll just keep getting rich off the sheep's back and dig stuff up until the Coalition presumably get kicked out of government. Make nice coffees for our tourists. It's like the Liberal Party hates the future. Alert moderator

Ashigaru: 02 Mar 2016 2:52:37pm John, Australia is way out on the edge of the world. We already have extremely high latency just due to our distance. Wireless adds additional latency which we should be trying to avoid as much as possible. In addition, if EVERYONE is on wireless the available bandwidth will be far too low. Better to save that bandwidth for applications where it is actually needed, and have everything else on fibre. Alert moderator

rockpicker: 01 Mar 2016 10:31:22pm Mal invented the internet indeed. He knew something maybe in the dial up days, NFI now. Wireless id unreliable in adverse weather. But he is a merchant banker and a lawyer. A wealthy scheming liar in layman's terms. Alert moderator

Mathew: 02 Mar 2016 12:00:45am Netflix and other streaming services work on FTTN, HFC & 4G and 50% of ADSL connections. Exclusive rights to sports is the one service that most people subscribe to Pay TV for. Alert moderator

Paul01: 02 Mar 2016 8:34:12am Mat, Netflix sort of works, the picture quality drops off dramatically as more people use the net at prime viewing times. Netflix used to have a HD option on the VPN from the US, not now. I go to the games with the money I save by not having pay TV and it is awesome, the kids love it. I refuse to pay to watch advertising at the same hourly rate as FTA TV, 18 or 20 minutes an hour I believe. In other words a third of the content you pay for is content you would rather not have to endure. I use a cheap VPN to legally download or watch free content from all over the world. If I really want to watch a game then it will generally be on Youtube a day or so after, I can wait. Tahs v Reds just the other day in glorious HD. Bugger Rupert and his corrupt market manipulating business model. Alert moderator

Chas: 02 Mar 2016 11:15:50am "Netflix and other streaming services work on FTTN, HFC & 4G and 50% of ADSL connections" You mean as long as there's only one person connected and that's all they are doing... Sadly, your comment does not reflect how the internet is used in most homes. Alert moderator

Malcolm: 01 Mar 2016 3:57:20pm Just another example of Abbott and the Coalition's policy of wrecking anything if it was Labor policy. Turnbull must also bear the blame, after all he sold out to Abbott just so he'd have a cabinet position. When are we going to be rid of this collection of wreckers, promise breakers and dunces who claim to be a government. Alert moderator

Hubert: 02 Mar 2016 8:58:39am Malcolm, They ARE a government, and a very effective one, it's just WHO they're governing for. It's not you or I, that's for sure. Alert moderator

John51: 01 Mar 2016 3:57:38pm Dove, very nasty politics with the whole of the country and the economy losing out. Turnbull loves to carry on about innovation and how he is going to lead Australia down this great innovation path in the greatest time to be alive and yet he killed off the NBN to leave us with this 3rd rate version of that NBN. So much for innovation. All words and no substance. Alert moderator

Mathew: 02 Mar 2016 12:47:15am > killed off the NBN to leave us with this 3rd rate version of that NBN FTTN might not be the latest technology, but currently 79% of Australians connected to FTTP have chosen 25Mbps or slower. Only 16% (down 3% in 12 months) have chosen 100Mbps and RSPs are refusing to sell 1Gbps plans that NBNCo made available for wholesale in December 2013. If NBNCo removed speed tiers from FTTN, for 79% of Australian's their speeds would be faster on FTTN, than FTTP. I struggle to comprehend how a Labor government could promote 1Gbps speeds in response to Google Fibre just prior to the 2010 election and develop a policy where 79% are connected at 25Mbps or slower and worse predict that in 2026 less than 1% would connect at 1Gbps. Alert moderator

Paul01: 02 Mar 2016 8:38:56am Sure Mat and when our great great grandfathers paid the government to build the copper network they had phones with cranks on the side and people working the exchange who plugged in plugs to connect you to your call. Jump forward to now and what are we trying to do with that antiquated infrastructure? Get the idea, it is for the future and you can't comprehend what your great great grandchildren will be doing with the network anymore than your ancestors could imagine what we try to do today. Do it once, do it right. Alert moderator

John51: 02 Mar 2016 12:09:13pm Paul01, you are right on the money and something the coaliton and Turnbull just can't get. Fibre has an estimated life of 50 to 80 years and that is the economy and use that you should be planning for as a minimum. People keep using the excuse of wireless but efficient wirless technology relies on fibre broadband with wireless connections as close to the user as possible. Alert moderator

Lardo: 01 Mar 2016 4:33:45pm What went wrong? The guvvament being in charge of this, that's what. And yet there's still so many who insist that the guvvament should own and build everything. As a general guide, when our brave, selfless pols tell how much a project like this will cost - double it, at least. Alert moderator

John51: 01 Mar 2016 5:21:50pm Lardo, Howard tried that for ten years leaving it to the private sector, even subsidising them and got nothing. The NBN was on schedule even if it took time to get the agreement of Telstra and Optus with its FTTP until Turnbull and Abbott played politics with it leaving us with this mess we have now got. In the end the copper and Turnbull/Abbott Nodes will have to go and be replaced with fibre to the premise, but it will cost us twice as much as doing it in the first place. Oh and take twice as long as well. Any half baked engineer knows that you do things once and you do it properly in the first place. This has nothing to do with who owns and builds it, public or private. This is all about the coalition playing dirty politics with it. This is supposed to be about nation building and instead they prefered to pay dirty politics with it. Alert moderator

LegendLength: 01 Mar 2016 5:47:03pm "Howard tried that for ten years leaving it to the private sector, even subsidising them and got nothing" Are you sure we got nothing? Unlimited ADSL 2+ gives you up to 24 megabit and costs around $50 bucks a month. The NBN is redundant and was made with no foresight of future technologies such as 4G wireless and higher. Alert moderator

Lardo: 01 Mar 2016 6:21:44pm Exactly. I seriously question all of these supposed benefits that will flow from NBN. Alert moderator

Nacnud: 01 Mar 2016 7:30:43pm Perhaps you should read a little more widely... Alert moderator

John51: 02 Mar 2016 12:19:23pm Lardo, if you question the supposed benefits of the NBN than I would suggest you can not see back into the past let alone into the future. My experience in life goes back well over 60 years and I can tell you very few people had the phone, a landline phone and computers were in their embryonic days and the internet not even thought of. The fibre technology we are investing in is about investing in the research, technology, economy and society of this country for the next 50 to 80 years, the estimated life of fibre. Wireless technology that people love to talk about relies on that fibre base for its function so talking about wireless is pointless without talking about fibre. Alert moderator

David H: 02 Mar 2016 1:11:04pm John51. That's right. Fibre is vital. But what is not vital is fibre to every home in urban Australia. Alert moderator

Kate: 01 Mar 2016 6:49:20pm Well ADSL2 is great if you can get that! I live in Geelong in an established area in a house that is about 10 years old and can only get ADSL1. None of the companies plan to put in anything above this, so we are stuck with slow internet. I'm tired of people who, because their internet is fast enough, think that it means that everyone's is fast enough! Seriously guys, do some research! Just because you can get a certain level of internet doesn't mean everyone's is the same and we don't live out in the county, we are in suburban areas. And don't tell me 4G wireless is an option. Where we live it often doesn't work and when it does it can be very slow, depending on how may people are using it. Alert moderator

tomtoot: 01 Mar 2016 11:38:47pm @Kate: - All that you say is true - and if Phony Tony was still PM you could expect nothing better - Even PM Turnbull can't offer anything better now without a super cost blowout - even though he and Abbott commissioned several audits of NBN CO., - 5 audits I believe to be the number so far! And the reason is political - the only reason was to denegrade the ALP who fostered the NBN originally - the resultant chaos is the NBN has become MTM - and what a sorry mess it is to date. Only the ALP had the foresight to deliver an NBN - sadly - only the LNP had the stupidity to rescind the NBN - A loss to us all - except those connected to the NBN now - wishful thinking to a lot of people is my guess? Alert moderator

Lardo: 02 Mar 2016 10:13:24am Tomtoot "Only Labor has the vision" - yeah, great vision, massive cost, all borrowed, and we'll be paying it for decades. Great. Alert moderator

Que: 01 Mar 2016 7:28:51pm @LegendLength, lol 4G.....wireless...lol you really think sharing bandwidth works? Alert moderator

LegendLength: 01 Mar 2016 8:25:20pm So tell me then, what is your very rough estimation of maximum speed per person when we hit this sharing limit? I'm happy for it to be plus or minus a couple of orders of magnitude. Worst case scenario of Sydney's population density is fine. I don't believe that would require much research into your position to come up with such a rough, ballpark number. And if you can't I can only assume you haven't really quantified the problem in any way. Alert moderator

John51: 01 Mar 2016 8:23:26pm LL, unlimted ADSL 2+ for who? Move into the regions of Australia and you are often lucky to get snalemail. Most people dream of half the speed you are talking about. As for 4G wirless, please tell me what you think 4G wireless works off and how far from its source as well as how many others are operating off it? It all operates off fibre if you are to have any speed that does not get suck up by too many people connceted to it. It might be ok in the major capital cities or in newer suburbs which have already been built with fibre to the premise. Strange that they do that rather than only have wireless or put in copper. I wonder why? Alert moderator

Michael : 01 Mar 2016 9:21:52pm You should really read a bit more. Nobody gets 24 Mbps from ADSL2+ unless they are living in a Telstra exchange. So the "up to" part of that statement is just an advertising con. Google and find a graph that shows you the way ADSL drops in speed as the distance to the exchange increase. At 3 km you are down to about 10 Mbps. And that assumes someone has recently run a clean twisted pair from you back to the exchange. Out in the real world the Telstra copper network is collapsing. Wireless is not a replacement for fibre optical cable. Alert moderator

been there, done that: 01 Mar 2016 9:44:12pm ADSL2 might deliver those speeds if you live close to the exchange. I'm at the end of the elderly copper cable, which means ADSL2 is only 2mbps max and constantly failing. I was lucky - I got cable internet while it was still possible to get. My suburb isn't even on the nbn rollout schedule yet. And this is in an inner suburb of Melbourne - my in-laws' place on the outskirts of Melbourne can only get ADSL1! Alert moderator

Mick: 01 Mar 2016 11:07:01pm And this is why we're currently ranked so highly in both internet speeds and access rates among developed countries? /s Alert moderator

David Ferstat: 02 Mar 2016 2:46:37am "Are you sure we got nothing? Unlimited ADSL 2+ gives you up to 24 megabit and costs around $50 bucks a month. The NBN is redundant and was made with no foresight of future technologies such as 4G wireless and higher." With apologies to Monty Python, "ADSL2? Luxury, sheer luxury"! You may have ADSL2, but many people don't. Many can't get it. Heck, there are people in capital cities who can't even get ADSL! I'm 11km from the centre of Perth, WA, and I can't get ADSL. I have to use wireless broadband, and I dread overcast weather, because the download speed heads rapidly floor-wards. There are many more people outside major population centres who can't even get that, and who have to rely upon dial-up. Given that wireless broadband, for reasons both technical and political, can never supply this need, we most certainly do need the NBN. Alert moderator

geggyg: 02 Mar 2016 2:47:54am Howard subsidised the Telco's to improve internet and mobile phone black spots in the country areas, Subsidising them to supply ADSL and ADSL2 to cities and larger towns wasn't necessary as it was basically required a slight upgrade to exchanges and some new equipment in the exchanges , both these systems used the existing areas . Even after ADSL 2 was completed many areas in cities which were too far away from the exchanges having to rely on slow dial up or expensive /low quota wireless internet. What Howard got for subsidising the upgrades was less than than 10% of the upgrades ( even though Telstra, IINET and OPTUS said the funding was adequate ) and an bigger bill if he wanted to complete , even Howard saw sense and said no more. Also don't forget just after Turnbull took over the NBN he interfered in the rollout , by spendiing over $30M to rent satellite space to give about 50 Blue Mountains residents Satellite Internet 9 mths early , it turned out only 6 houses signed up , as the others moved there to escape constant communication. Many bought weekenders there so they could escape the rate race for a couple of days and recharge. Alert moderator

geggyg: 02 Mar 2016 2:28:34am If business had been in charge ( with no govt requirements ) there would not have been a universal wholesale price across Aust. They wouldn't have provided NBN to many rural and remote areas ( not profitable) unless they charged them an exorbitant price . THis is the situation in the US even Google which is laying a lot of fibre pick and choose suburbs in large cities and ignoring other poorer areas . The same in rural America many areas don't have decent connection or no connection at all. After Super Storm Sandy the main Telco ( they have virtual monopolies in most of the US) pulled all their cable ( copper and fibre) to islands off the coast of New York and connected them for phone and internet through wireless , the bandwidth was overloaded and many businesses couldn't connect to the mainland , leaving ATMs and EFTPOS machines sitting idle, the residents are currently suing to have the company reinstall landlines . So mush for business always being better than govt Alert moderator

jonmarks: 01 Mar 2016 5:30:38pm I doubt if there is an IT professional in this country who wouldn't call the Coalition 'NBN' a dud. From the power required for the nodes, to 19th century copper technology and the MTM connection issues it is a network with maintenance problems and failure built in from the start. It will most likely be in the process of being upgraded well before it is finished. And all this from our, theoretically most tech savvy parliamentarian and PM. It is a nonsense, derived from a political position of simple gainsay opposition combined with a myopic bottom-line driven 'cheap is always better' meanness. Of course our government should watch the pennies and spend wisely but because they never wanted to do this project in the first place they have ended up in a position where their addiction to cost cutting in the short term is leading the country down an expensive path to a 'junk' status 'NBN' with limited worth and in the end no value. For some reason conservatives only seem able to see value in long term investments that include defense contracts. Often in the real world the cheapest option can be the most expensive investment -for example spending on diagnostic and preventative medicine can seem expensive in the short term but pays big dividends down the track, even to the bean counters. Alert moderator

Paul: 02 Mar 2016 8:19:37am FTTN will be obsolete within a decade. We will have to spend billions more to make it FTTP. Read up on the technology, consider how fast speeds have been increasing and read up on upcoming computer technology. You conservatives think technology will remain "frozen" at 2015, where 25 Mbps is ok for a residential user. That's insanity. Alert moderator

zen fang chiew: 01 Mar 2016 6:30:19pm That's it a nutshell. This excuse for a government is sacrificing the general public and business good for the benefit of Telstra, and also because it hates it that the NBN is a Labor idea. Alert moderator

Tory Boy: 01 Mar 2016 7:34:18pm What went wrong? It was started! Optus already offer faster speeds wirelessly, and with recent reports on the next version of wifi speeding things up even faster, union-labors attempt at creating a new unionised monopoly service provider are looking exactly the way I thought they would. Alert moderator

Herkimer Snerd: 02 Mar 2016 12:19:38pm "Wifi", as you call it, is not the answer. It is slow, expensive, bandwidth limited and unreliable compared to fibre. You are technologically illiterate. Alert moderator

Grey: 02 Mar 2016 8:25:20am Well Paddy if appropriate or not has brought the Irish into the fold Dove and with " than Labor expected to finish its rollout. ", all joking aside Kevin may have been Dux of his school and yet that does not necessarily mean that his mathematics and planning is so good that a plan could be generated on the back of the envelope as was reputed to have occurred. Again, we have had a Labor government creating false expectations with no real concept of the project size nor funding, even if it was supposedly to be covered by more expectations of forward estimates. The reality of life is that many people need to awaken and find it is not a money tree growing in their backyard. Yes, with " But as a matter of degree, they were only a year behind, and only a few billion over-budget, on their own figures - ", enough of the Irish jokes please. If a government really wants to create a well used and useful infrastructure they first ought to gain some appreciation of just how many people need or want a super speed digital highway and then how they ought to have just the users paying rather than all taxpayers - tghose kind of figures likely to be even more frightening. Alert moderator

LMAO: 02 Mar 2016 9:02:13am What went wrong was 'end users' stepping into a world they don't understand and bought something they can't get a refund for. Moral of the story: Always ask a professional for help before installing technical equipment. Alert moderator

Tropix: 02 Mar 2016 2:24:50pm That's right Dove. Too many people are STILL going on about the Left/Right argument - just look at many of the comments here. Most people who are still going on about Political parties probably think the NBN is about online gaming. The complete underestimation and politicising of THE most important infrastructure system of the 21st century just shows where we are at, Our golden opportunity squandered by politicians, many of who won't be around to understand the huge error and selfishness of their ways. If people actually took on board what this was (no longer "is") about, the majority would be prepared to pay a small amount toward it for the future of their children. Yes - technology will change but with FTTP we would have had some kind of infrastructure to work with. But now, it's too late. Do people actually understand this last statement? Alert moderator

fair suck of the sav: 01 Mar 2016 3:24:57pm On this basis Turnbull is not fit to lead the country demonstrating that he prefers to put politics ahead of nation building. Alert moderator

Paul01: 01 Mar 2016 3:56:20pm To be fair it was Tony who instructed Mal to "destroy the NBN". Alert moderator

Malcolm: 01 Mar 2016 4:41:27pm Abbott's only claim to fame (albeit dismal) is his capacity to wreck any positive thing. Now he is determined to wreck the Turnbull government - we all remember his prolonged dummy spit when Gillard beat him to the PM's job. Now we're seeing another dummy spit because the Liberals rightly dumped him. I wonder when someone is going to revoke his Liberal party membership on the grounds that he is determined to destroy the party. Perhaps he and his few like-minded supporters could form their own party, they'd run in the next election, get trounced and that would be, thankfully for Australia, the end of them. Alert moderator

Gary: 01 Mar 2016 5:33:18pm They could call it the No Poofters Party: where anything different is to be feared and attacked. Alert moderator

hodgo: 01 Mar 2016 5:22:11pm To be fair it was Tony who instructed Mal to "destroy the NBN". And since when did Turnbull do everything that Tony instructed? Alert moderator

may: 01 Mar 2016 4:05:11pm ...and what is new? But he was put out as an expert! Alert moderator

Mark D.: 01 Mar 2016 4:07:38pm I have a great deal of respect for Turnbull in the terms of ethics and morality. That is not something I commonly assign to politicians. This does NOT, I repeat firmly NOT translate into support for him as PM or imply that I will vote LNP - I can assure you I will be voting for them last. I "defend" Turnbull only in saying "this was Abbott's baby" and his policy. Part of the reason it was given to Turnbull is the way Abbott gave poisoned chalices to his rivals. Have a shot at Abbot - fine. Argue with the LNP - fine. Say Turnbull did wrong - again fine. But he was in a place where every option was negative and in this situation - he did the best he could. I note that that assigning blame does not stop the haemorrhaging of my tax dollars. What a disaster. Alert moderator

Storm: 01 Mar 2016 4:27:06pm As I said above, Malcolm could have changed tack once PM. Instead, he just continued with this farcical fake NBN which will need even more money thrown at it in the future to be fixed. Telstra management have been laughing all the way to the bank with both governments (more so Liberals). Funny how Telstra started selling Foxtel not too long ago. Alert moderator

mt_syd: 01 Mar 2016 4:29:10pm Turnbull always had the option of resigning from his position as communications minister, but he accepted the responsibility and defended the new NBN plan vigorously. Basically he sacrificed billions of taxpayer dollars in the name of his own ambitions. Alert moderator

Mark D.: 01 Mar 2016 5:12:44pm @mt_syd Disagree. The first thing is that resigning from his ministry would have been disloyal to the party. The illusion of solidarity and getting behind the leader is what they were selling. It would have been a betrayal of the party. A bad choice. It would also not change anything as someone else would have done it. Another bad choice. I put myself in his shoes and every choice .. EVERY choice was bad. And the outcome would not be changed in any way by any of the actions. He was "set up to fail" and any action he made would have resulted in failure. I do NOT endorse anything he did. My tax dollars are bleeding on the ground. You can hardly call me "his supporter" as I am not his supporter. But I do not blame the jerk who is so trapped that they have no real option. He was only the messenger. I do not shoot the messenger. Alert moderator

spacey 101: 01 Mar 2016 5:54:45pm Well I guess it's lucky for Malcolm that Tony never asked him to jump off a bridge then... Alert moderator

Mark D.: 01 Mar 2016 6:42:08pm @spacey In a political sense, he did. Malcolm has to answer for his part in the stuff up. And he cannot duck out of it either. But compare the ways others in Abbott's camp did on their hatchet jobs. You have an entire front bench to choose from. Is there even ONE other whom you hold up in terms of ethics and morality? The others showed ... immorality in their hatchet jobs. Only Turnbull is the hold out on the ethics side of his hatchet job.

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Reilly: 01 Mar 2016 3:28:42pm It's, frankly, a bit rich for the ABC to complain about any problems with Turnbull's NBN, given its complicity in gifting it to him. Alert moderator

bide and fecht: 01 Mar 2016 3:37:57pm Oh sure, not like they've had a couple of years to sort it out. Alert moderator

gnome: 01 Mar 2016 4:10:32pm Just before the last election poor old Anthony Albanese, Kevin Rudds' newly appointed communications minister, didn't know the difference between a megabit and a kilobyte. Emma Alberici, didn't care about that, when she was interviewing him and Turnbull about the NBN on Lateline. All she wanted to do was embarrass Turnbull, and all she did was show that she didn't know the difference between a total project cost and capital outlay. And she wasn't going to be told! Not by Turnbull.! Turnbull was furious, but kept together well. He won't have forgotten, but I am surprised Alberici has survived this long. The ABC has a poor record on NBN commentary, and it isn't running Turnbull's way. Alert moderator

Chris L: 01 Mar 2016 4:38:28pm ABC are facing allegations by their former tech expert of attempting to skew reporting in favour of the Coalition and they held off publication of an article revealing the many problems with Mr Abbott's NBN hatchetjob until after the election. The allegations become more credible now Mr Turnbull has confirmed he made calls to the ABC demanding more favourable coverage. Seems those reviews were right. The ABC actually has a slight bias toward the Coalition. Alert moderator

Kocsonya: 01 Mar 2016 5:40:23pm > Anthony Albanese [...] didn't know the difference between a megabit and a kilobyte. Quite possibly not a single politician in the cabinet or shadow cabinet has the slightest idea about the difference between monomode and multi-mode optical fibres or between store-and-forward and cut-through switching or any other scientific or engineering aspect of a digital data network. That is why they should listen to scientists and engineers who, by and large, know what they are talking about. The consensus on their side is (and has been) that FTTP is the best solution we have. It is the fastest known technology, it is not sensitive to external disturbance (bar a backhoe), it is a homogenous system (i.e. maintenance cost is lower) and needs the least amount of equipment per kilometre (again, maintenance cost is lower). Naturally, in politics that doesn't matter. If Labor by any accident listened to those techo people and proposed a system accordingly, the Coalition must attack it. Now if Labor started to build it, the Coalition must dismantle it and build something else. It doesn't matter whether it is more expensive, inferior or simply doesn't work - it's not their money and not their problem. What is important is political pointscoring and finding ways of making money out of it somehow. Alert moderator

Mathew: 02 Mar 2016 12:52:20am You can listen to the technology experts, but if you choke the network with an artificial financial model that predicts 50% will connect at 12Mbps on fibre and results in 79% connecting at 25Mbps or slower then it really doesn't matter what technology you choose. Alert moderator

G Man: 02 Mar 2016 1:18:39pm Can you stop flogging that old dead horse. It doesn't matter if the speed is 25mb or 1GB, the basic Fibre infrastructure is the same, and much better than a very outdated copper. It doesnt matter if Joe blow down the street can theoretically get 25MB on copper, Fibre is a much better future proof technology which should replace a very neglected and aging copper network. Alert moderator

Reinhard: 01 Mar 2016 6:17:43pm Gnome my recollection of that debate was that Turnbull used the difference between total project cost and capital outlay to inflate the costs and deflate projected revenues of FTTP Alert moderator

revitup: 01 Mar 2016 4:11:38pm Reilly are you implying that the ABC gifted to the LNP coalition, the numbers to gain government at the last election? Alert moderator

Piglet: 01 Mar 2016 3:29:05pm Labor FTTP NBN started very slowly but the rollout was well underway and starting to ramp up in pace. Then Turnbull and Abbott got in and destroyed it, then spent years hacking a poor quality redesign, basically changing horse mid-stream (from Phar Lap to Eeyore) and now the whole premise of that change is gone. Thanks Turnbull. You're no better than Abbott. Alert moderator

mark: 01 Mar 2016 4:06:17pm I wonder if Turnbull understands that this is a vote changer for many young people? Alert moderator

Blzbob: 01 Mar 2016 5:51:10pm What Turnbull is delivering will be adequate for all those young Australians who's only interest is to upload their latest selfie to their facbook page, or watch a low res youtube clip of a cat water skiing, ... but not a great deal more. Alert moderator

spacey 101: 02 Mar 2016 12:05:33am Your a fool. This isn't about selfies!! This is about Australia's future! You know my brother runs a business here in Oz that relies on the Internet. He has clients across the world, and his competition is global too. My brother is thinking of moving overseas as his business cannot currently grow. You see these clients send out specs of what needs to be done to tender. These files are huge. In the time it takes my brother to download a file many of his competitors have downloaded theirs, worked in a submission and uploaded the whole lot back. My brother though extremely good at what he does simply cannot compete with that. Lucky for him there are 44 countries with faster and better internet than ours. Unfortunately the loss of my brother will also result in about 10 employees losing their jobs. Now seperate from my brother, there are the health applications, education applications, science, technology, business, investment... The list is endless. And all you can think of is selfies. How pathetic. Your thinking may be that limited, but as a group we are pretty bright and selfies doesn't even come into the equation. Alert moderator

Richard: 01 Mar 2016 5:29:40pm By the time they left govt NBNCo rollout was at 3,000 premises a week (today's "failed" model passing 10 times their best performance), a third (MDUs) unable to order a service. 154k premises after 4.5 years (6 years in govt). Quigleys Cost Per Premises had blown out from $2300 to $3500 ($7000-5000 in TAS). His contractor model in disarray, NBNCo completely dysfunctional. It's 3,500 staff enough to indivually welcome 1 premise a week, or 1 activation a month (and take the rest off). The NBN policy is a disaster (all models). But let's not ignore reality, whilst a predominantly fibre network would have been worth more its cost would have ensured taxpayer losses much greater than $22b write off expected under the latest model. Alert moderator

Nathan: 01 Mar 2016 3:29:14pm Firstly it all went wrong when Rudd and Conroy conceived the policy on an A4 sheet of Foolscap. Then Mr Waffles Turnbull got to it in all his incompetence, boredom and sanctimonious priggery. With Rudd and Turnbull's legacy though, that Gillard fella is looking better and better. Gillard btw invested in Education and Disability spending, important to the fair go and core responsibilities of the nation. While Rudd and Turnbull have wasted Australia's gold on our capability to live stream Walking Dead. The question isn't what went wrong with the NBN, it's what went wrong with Public Policy in Oz, and how do our politicians get away with frittering our hard earned tax dollars away. Alert moderator

quadfan: 01 Mar 2016 3:45:19pm So the panel of experts that reported back to Conroy and recommended Fibre to the premises over the original Labor government option Fibre to the Node was a figment of his imagination? And the fact that you consider it a black mark against him that he took the experts' advice. Also the Telstra/Telecom research done in the late nineties regarding fibre to the premises does not really exists either - it just made up. I really appreciate if people would just tell the truth. Alert moderator

Piglet: 01 Mar 2016 3:56:37pm Look I'm no fan of either Rudd or Conroy because they got the schedule of the FTTP NBN so utterly wrong. They should have been more realistic in the scheduling and not got peoples' hopes up too soon. I also agree with this piece, they should have targeted high usage areas first. But theirs was the only NBN model fit to call an NBN in this current century. Turnbull has been utterly shameless in his usage of political rhetoric and mendacious numbers in order to dismantle the only real NBN, and replace it with something which is not a real NBN. Now Turnbull's "Not An NBN" will be nearly the cost of FTTP and nearly the rollout schedule of FTTP. For the same dollars and the same schedule I would want our tax dollars spent on an FTTP instead of his "Not An NBN". Turnbull has cost us dearly because some time this century we will need a real FTTP NBN. FYI, for communications, not just movie downloads. Alert moderator

Paul01: 01 Mar 2016 4:01:09pm People being educated and people with disabilities are big users of the internet. The NBN was a true piece of nation building infrastructure and it was needed to replace the old copper network. A Telstra tech I know tells of patch up over patch up and no one knowing what is connected to what anymore in the copper network, it needed fixing so why not upgrade to the best tech available. Do it once, do it right. Alert moderator

spacey 101: 01 Mar 2016 4:07:27pm I'd like to point out that Nathan's statement is utterly incorrect and built in an absolute falsehood. The NBN may have been conceived on an A4 pice of paper, most good ideas do. But when the NBN was actually proposed it was a policy document more than 300 pages long. I implore Nathan to read the many, many articles written by IT specialists both in Australia and abroad. He will find that the vast majority of gem believe that the Liberal version is an absolute mess. They ALL agree that that Mal's version is more complex, liable to breakdowns, and will need to be replaced. They ALL agree that fibre to the premises IS future proof, no matter how The Waffler tries to wiggle his way out of it. In addition to this pretty much every economist you can read from agreed that Labors model will be far cheaper in the long run than the abomination created by the Libs. Why? Because the Labor model relies on a technology which is durable, lasts for decades with minimal wear, and requires next to zero maintenance. On the other hand the Liberal model relies on outdated copper, which even Telstra admits is on its last legs and needs replacing. The other problem with copper is obvious. It degrades quickly, is highly corrosive, is high maintenance, and is costly to replace. Now the big kicker? The Liberal economic modelling DOES NOT include the cost of maintenance and replacement cost of the copper. That along would cost, it's estimated, $10s on billions of dollars. Alert moderator

Siderealisme: 01 Mar 2016 4:25:46pm Oh yeah. It's not like Australians are ever going to make their own Walking Dead on their own streaming service, and have podcasts and youtube shows spring up discussion the walking dead, bringing money to pretty much everyone. NBN is great and would provide a return on investment. We can't all be teachers and doctors Alert moderator

TruthTeller: 01 Mar 2016 4:40:01pm That is not how it happened. Just a LNP myth. There were IT experts in the room, and a lot of work was already in place. I was there. Alert moderator

notathome: 01 Mar 2016 5:02:49pm Why do we need paved roads? Horses don't need them. $79 billion is the estimated value of our digital economy. All our entertainment needs in the future will be online and many people like me haven't watched broadcast TV for many years nor get our news from any source other than the internet. Just because you don't use something doesn't mean the rest of the country shouldn't be able to. Also, if you're an older Australian, you've had it much better than the younger generations in so many ways. Alert moderator

Lardo: 01 Mar 2016 6:25:38pm notathome "Just because you don't use something doesn't mean the rest of the country shouldn't be able to" That's fine, but as this is essentially an entertainment device then let the users pay a price that reflects what it cost to provide that NBN. Alert moderator

Kocsonya: 01 Mar 2016 7:51:15pm > That's fine, but as this is essentially an entertainment device I think that proves the point of notathome: "Just because you don't use..." For you, the Internet might be nothing but an entertainment device. For many other people, while it can be used for entertainment, it is also or even primarily a device with a multitude of uses form education to commerce to science to medicine and many, many others. Just because you can't appreciate or understand the advantages of global, high speed and high volume communication (apart from facilitating entertainment) it doesn't mean that it doesn't have those advantages. There were always people who could not understand the advantages of the steam engine, electricity, radio, aeroplanes, computers and a myriad of other inventions that we consider essential today. Yet those inventions got around because there were people who actually understood the possibilities. Alert moderator

YouKnowNothing: 02 Mar 2016 11:42:03am If the internet was an entertainment device. Why don't you disconnect today. You really don't need it right? Go line up at the bank to do your banking, start receiving paper bills through snail mail, how about go back to an analog phone running on copper and using a manual dial, forget about video conferencing with friends and families overseas. The century old copper cables won't designed for Todays Internet. Yet they are developed into what we have today. Fibre may not appear appealing for YOUR use cases, but there are already a magnitude of ideas developing that will transform the way we do things now and in the future. "I guess you can predict the future with your narrow minded thinking". YouKnowNothing. Alert moderator

Blzbob: 01 Mar 2016 5:59:26pm FTTP NBN was another lost opportunity to create high tech jobs and train Australian youths to execute them. The liberals ... keeping Australia dumb. Alert moderator

Lardo: 01 Mar 2016 7:32:06pm Bizbob If jobs need to be "created" by artificial guvvament demand, then those jobs don't deserve to exist. Alert moderator

Michael : 01 Mar 2016 9:26:30pm Business needs infrastructure. Access to transport, electricity, water and these days fast reliable internet. Alert moderator

Blzbob: 01 Mar 2016 10:19:41pm Nothing artificial about delivering improved infrastructure lardo, perhaps you prefer "work for the dole" schemes and "voluntary" work for the numerous "unemployed". Alert moderator

spacey 101: 02 Mar 2016 12:12:03am Well, yes Lardo. Otherwise your all wonderful private sector would have already done it. If we always had to wait for the private sector we wouldn't have mass sanitation, highways, bridges, space travel and all its scientific benefits and spin offs from it. None of those things would have happened had we waited for the private sector. Alert moderator

boyo: 01 Mar 2016 11:28:00pm Peter Costello sold Australia's gold at a rock-bottom price - Better economic managers? Alert moderator

Cap'n: 01 Mar 2016 3:30:07pm It is simple really. There needs to be a Royal Commission into why the current government made massive financial decisions (billions upon billion of dollars - it puts pink batts, Craig Thomson and Peter Slipper into quite a perspective) that was knowingly, directly and unequivocally to the detriment of the country both now and well into the future. Alert moderator

mara: 01 Mar 2016 4:07:36pm I would support this. If Labor is in next time they may well do this. Alert moderator

Lardo: 01 Mar 2016 4:38:17pm Cap'n Define "detriment to the country'. And does it take opportunity cost into account? Alert moderator

Codger: 01 Mar 2016 7:36:51pm Inane obfuscation is sign of desperation. Alert moderator

Kocsonya: 01 Mar 2016 8:09:53pm Lardo, > Define "detriment to the country'. The country being harmed. In this particular case by spending money on a system that is obsolete by design has a very high maintenance cost, delivers inferior performance and has no built-in reserves at all. > And does it take opportunity cost into account? Probably not. @Cap'n spoke about billions upon billions, but considering that there is a better than even chance that we're heading towards an information economy, the long term cost of choosing a system that puts Australia decades behind her competitors, the opportunity cost might be in the hundreds of billions if not trillions. Alert moderator

DWM: 01 Mar 2016 10:36:57pm Just like John Howard did they are throwing good money after bad. that is to the detriment of the country. It was to the detriment of the country that Howard squandered some $314 Billion on election bribes instead of putting money away for a rainy day. Abbott/Turnbull have turned a nation building project into an ex[pensive dud that will not return dividends to the Bond holders for many years to come. Alert moderator

Lardo: 02 Mar 2016 10:21:02am DWM Haven't you heard of the future fund? And paying off 100 billion of debt? Alert moderator

Dean: 02 Mar 2016 12:49:32am I define detriment to the country as changing a technically sound infrastructure project, the largest in australian history, into a clusterfuck mishmash of technologies - one that the author of has admitted will eventually be obsolete within 10 years instead of 100 years, for the sake of political expedience and at the cost of more money than some countries of the worlds entire GDP. Good enough for you? Alert moderator

quadfan: 01 Mar 2016 3:30:50pm The sad thing is that no one will go to jail for this unmitigated disaster Alert moderator

darthseditious: 01 Mar 2016 7:43:24pm Which is strange really considering there is nothing in the constitution which states that a former government cannot be brought to account for detrimental decisions made on their watch. The simple fact is no government will press charges against a former government for fear of the same being done to them when they are turfed out. Alert moderator

Son of Zaky: 01 Mar 2016 3:31:22pm "The MTM network has blown out twice in projected cost - first, from $29.5 billion to $41 billion, and then last year to "up to" $56 billion" There's never been a more exciting time to be a telecommunications contractor. As an aside, my warmest appreciation goes out to Tony "You do it once, you do it right, and you do it with fibre" Windsor. Thank you for being one of the intelligent people in the room Tony - I'm sorry that the so-called "financial conservatives" couldn't bring themselves to stop hating you. We all lose because of their stupidity. Alert moderator

John51: 01 Mar 2016 4:09:56pm Son of Zaky, it was not just because of Turnbull and Abbott's stupidity. It was more because of their determination to gain government at any cost no matter the damage they did along the way or into the long-term economic viability of this country. The stupidity was in the country believing them and letting them get away with it. Turnbull model was to build this so called NBN out of both new and old worn out parts with bandaids everywhere to hold it together. That is what his so called hubs are, bandaids holding the new parts the fibre cable together with the old parts the worn out copper cable. Can you imagine any engineer rolling up proposing that sort of constrution model. He would be laughed out of a job and career. Alert moderator

Dean: 01 Mar 2016 4:39:55pm The great tragedy is that there weren't really any votes in killing the NBN, Abbott and Turnbull just did it to please their paymasters at NewsCorp and other media/telecoms owners who paved the way for it with their misleading media. This didn't mean the public ever stopped supporting the NBN, they just didn't believe in it enough to vote against the dismantling of it. A vital piece of future infrastructure ruined because the political system allows people like Abbott and Turnbull to serve their paymasters before the people they represent. Alert moderator

John51: 01 Mar 2016 5:26:52pm Dean, you are right up to a point, but this was also about dirty politics in using it to discredit the economic credentials of labor. Discredit labor's NBN with the voting public, or at least enough of them and you discredit labor. We and the future of this country are the ones who lose out in this Turnbull/Abbott using the labor NBN of FTTP as a political football. Alert moderator

Chubblo: 01 Mar 2016 3:38:34pm The main problem that's occurred with the roll out is that because Labor were unfortunate enough to lose the 2013 election, the project was then given to the Liberals. Unfortunately the Liberals being the party whose entire ideology revolves around being against Labor and the unions for any reason they can think of (and sometimes seemingly for no reason at all) believed that they knew better and decided to create a half-priced monster of a system involving mixed technology. Which has ended in a complete shambles as predicted by just about everyone who isn't either in the Coalition or a rusted on supporter. However the Liberals being who they are won't admit that the whole futile exercise has been a failure which not only will cost more than they originally budgeted for, but will also be unlikely to generate a return. And even if it is completely implemented by 2020 (or 2030 more likely) the whole system will be significantly third world in comparison to a few of our Asian neighbours who actually have visionary thinkers in their ranks. Malcolm Turnbull should hang his head in shame for (or have a teary about it) what he and his party have done to Australia's future. They should apologise and attempt to remedy the situation rather than continually blame Labor and every other party for their own incompetence. Or preferably they should just give up, call an early election and disband the Coalition for this and numerous other reasons. Shame, shame, shame. Alert moderator

David Ferstat: 01 Mar 2016 4:52:33pm "... Labor were unfortunate enough to lose the 2013 election ..." I think this is over-generous. Labor did all it could to lose the election with leadership changes and policy backflips. I couldn't consider it to be an accident. Alert moderator

GreyBags: 01 Mar 2016 10:05:00pm And we got a government that was far more dishonest and did triple backflips with pike while working towards Turnbull/Abbott/Turnbull/Abbott. At least Labor could run the economy. We've slipped from No. 1 in the OECD to seventh. Plus we have a crap Frankenstein's monster of an NBN. More lightning Malcolm, we need more lightning.The NBN will live!!! Alert moderator

David Ferstat: 02 Mar 2016 10:45:02am GreyBags, I think you misunderstand me. I'm not defending the Coalition in any wise. I'm simply saying that Labor's loss was a direct result of its own actions, and not a matter of luck. Alert moderator

Chubblo: 02 Mar 2016 12:07:39pm David Ferstat: I'm actually in complete agreement with you which is why I made the mistake of voting for the Coalition 2013. I made the poor assumption at the time that they couldn't be worse. Alert moderator

Machiavelli's Cat: 01 Mar 2016 3:40:23pm "There is no doubt Labor's NBN would have sold for more, improving the return for taxpayers." This is not true, the PWC valuation was based on future earnings. Both systems, being built as monopolies, would have roughly the same revenue and therefore the same valuation. Alert moderator

quadfan: 01 Mar 2016 3:51:30pm I am sorry but your analysis is wrong. As Fibre to the Node has limited upgrade potential without an expensive rebuild the cost would have to factored in it's value and thereby reduce it. Also as 100/40 ubiquity cannot be guaranteed there is and will be reduced uptake on the faster plans thereby reducing potential revenue. Alert moderator

R Supwood: 01 Mar 2016 3:53:08pm You ignore maintenance issues, replacements, amortisation over time, durability and relevance to future change. ALP's NBN is about twice as good and valuable. Twice. Alert moderator

Son of Zaky: 01 Mar 2016 3:54:08pm So, a monopoly that has fewer moving parts, requiring far less attention to maintain, and which offers a superior product which can attract people to use it to a greater extent than would otherwise be the case with an inferior monopoly will still have the same valuation as that inferior monopoly held together by gaffer tape and jars of Clag? Wow. You really are a loss to the world of business by being here. Oops. Rants seem to be coming thick-and-fast today. Alert moderator

ThingFish: 01 Mar 2016 11:36:59pm " held together by gaffer tape and jars of Clag?" Hey.. I had all but forgotten about "Clag"... I remember that! Nostalgia just ain't what it used to be! :-) Alert moderator

Mr 14 per cent: 01 Mar 2016 3:59:49pm Mate, there's no point using rational arguments in this forum. Your fellow posters are mostly Labor/Greens supporters. Like ALP politicians - who, after all are ex unionists and ambulance chasing lawyers - they haven't a clue about concepts like NPV. They wouldn't know a discount rate if they fell over one. On the back of the ALP's ridiculous NBN idea, I bought Telstra shares because I reckoned Telstra would get the better of Conroy in negotiations (I got that right) and because Telstra would pick up the NBN at a bargain basement price once it was sold. Alert moderator

Rhino: 01 Mar 2016 4:31:48pm From the answers being given here, this Chartered Accountant who will not be voting LNP, can confirm that Machiavelli's cat is quite wrong, both in a pure financial sense and most likely, technically as well. The majority of the persons replying are correct and are giving accurate answer and explanations to back them up. This answers is drawing upon my technical skills and experience, you can challenge it, but you most likely will be wrong. Alert moderator

Lardo: 01 Mar 2016 4:40:17pm Mr 14% You're absolutely right - and one other concept that seemingly escapes all on here is "opportunity cost" - of if they know what it is, deride it as a "neoliberal concept", thus deserving of scorn. Alert moderator

spacey 101: 01 Mar 2016 5:59:43pm What. The opportunity cost of buying an inferior, slower, more expensive network? No wonder so many Liberals live in cuckoo land. Facts just simply evade them. Incredible. Alert moderator

Lardo: 01 Mar 2016 7:36:12pm spacey No, the opportunity cost of billions of dollars of debt and interest on this project. Alert moderator

UnKnown: 01 Mar 2016 10:30:10pm Seen on a T shirt Confuse a Liberal. Use facts and logic. Alert moderator

R Supwood: 01 Mar 2016 5:09:40pm A childish fascist rant from a right wing boofhead is of no use here. Try logic, facts, information or silence. Alert moderator

Lardo: 01 Mar 2016 6:27:31pm R Supwood Nice to see that the tolerant, diversity-respecting, live-and-let-live left wing people are here tonight. Alert moderator

Son of Zaky: 01 Mar 2016 7:02:59pm Yes, and you boofheads really test their tolerance to the limit. I should know, I'm a tolerant, diversity-respecting, live-and-let-live swinging voter (currently in Malcolm's camp = a current Liberal voter) and you have the same effect on me. Alert moderator

Lardo: 01 Mar 2016 7:33:21pm Sons of Zaky I never use such attacks in my posts, it's just mean. Alert moderator

ThingFish: 01 Mar 2016 11:41:11pm "I never use such attacks in my posts, it's just mean." Not to mention that the moderator is not supposed to let them through, despite having recently chided a frustrated respondent to remain polite and not post anything that might be construed as deliberately trying to start an argument. Alert moderator

Peedro: 02 Mar 2016 8:41:44am Only including logic and facts in this forum would wipe out about 99% of contributions. Alert moderator

Madmax: 01 Mar 2016 5:15:16pm Mr 14%

I can assure you sir an ambulance chasing lawyer defiantly knows a discount when they see one. How are those Telstra shares working out for you? A NBN network would have made money lots of money for a government that is now hell bent to raise taxes and make saving in the budget Alert moderator

ephemeral: 01 Mar 2016 4:02:43pm Future earnings valuations are based on the predicted uptake/desirability of the service. A cut down version will deliver a poorer service, thus attracting less demand (why change from my current connection if the NBN will be no better), thus generating a lower predicted revenue stream, thus lowering the future earnings valuation. The NBN is not a true monopoly as reasonable (sort of, at least compared to the current NBN version) alternatives exist. Imagine two toll roads (imaginary ones, going from the same "a" to the same "b", one has a design that is twice as fast as the local roads, the other only 1.5 times as fast, do you think they would attract the same toll revenue? Alert moderator

Rhino: 01 Mar 2016 4:04:16pm Nope, valuations are based on revenues, costs, profits and future liabilities. Which network would be more profitable, have lower costs and incur lower future liabilities? I can't say for sure, but not the MTM network with it's mixed bag of slower technologies requiring more money to upgrade. Alert moderator

Geoff2: 01 Mar 2016 4:05:25pm You haven't put the maintenance cost and likely take up of either system into the equation Alert moderator

Piglet: 01 Mar 2016 4:07:13pm Turnbull's has a near-future capacity problem because it will contain so much copper and old HFC. This problem would not have existed in a 93% FTTP NBN, it would have handled much greater capacities as each decade demands it. "There is no doubt Labor's NBN would have sold for more, improving the return for taxpayers." This is true. Alert moderator

Newspeaker: 01 Mar 2016 4:08:25pm The MTM has higher operational costs. The FTTN portion of the network is also unable to provide the revenue from higher speed tiers. The network will also require replacing sooner. It will not earn as much. Alert moderator

DC: 01 Mar 2016 4:08:39pm The ongoing maintenance costs of the MTM NBN are going to be a perpetual deadweight on the business compared to the original FTTH infrastructure and will ensure that the revenue of a future sell off is only going to be a fraction of what it could have been. Try asking the 99% of people who know something about technology before believing ignorant politicians or financial consultants who get paid to deliver favourable reports to their clients. Alert moderator

RealityCheck: 01 Mar 2016 4:15:38pm Hi Machiavelli's Cat. :) The point is that Labor's NBN would have been less messy and costly in maintenance, replacement and expansion than Turnbull's 'dog's breakfast' of a fiber-nodes-and-copper' mongrelized disaster. So the earnings for investors would have been greater from Labor's NBN because less costs and problems result in more net profit for investor returns on capital for purchase. Read Paddy's expose' again, carefully. Cheers. :) Alert moderator

Hank Moody: 01 Mar 2016 4:25:40pm That's not right. The original NBN was easily upgradeable, future speed increases would be relatively cheap to implement, thus more speed options to could be offered to customers. That is worth a lot to a private company looking at buying infrastructure designed to last decades. Alert moderator

fredn: 01 Mar 2016 4:36:19pm And, MC, despite one network being all new glass fibre, and the other network being a patchwork of old copper, re-purposed HFC, an endless number of boxes on street corners with batteries and power connections and ongoing maintenance issues, and all the complex management and computing power required to knit together the multiple technologies, the value is all in the revenue? The expected life of the hardware, ongoing running costs and maintenance will have no effect on the price an investor would pay? Please, I hope you are there when this hodge podge is put up for sale. Will be interested to see your offer. Alert moderator

notathome: 01 Mar 2016 4:45:19pm That is incorrect and you highlight one of the major problems with the NBN. People with little comprehension of the technology weighing in. Fibre will be suitable for decades to come. There's no better option for cabling on the horizon and there's unlikely to ever be one in our lifetimes. If better methods for for the transmission of the data come along the same fibre will almost certainly be able to do this. Copper is the exact opposite. It has very finite capabilities and newer technologies will most likely need much more capable copper lines. I live in a relatively new suburb, about ten years old, and already our copper lines have degraded to the point our ADSL1 speeds have had to be downgraded simply so we can stay connected for more than a few minutes at a time. Therefore for future buyers one is clearly a better investment option whereas the other is a potential nightmare of ever escalating maintenance. They won't be wasting money on upgrading ancient technology and the upgrades they will want to perform will be much cheaper. The reason most people don't seem to get how woeful Turnbull's plan is is that it's not tangible. If people could physically see the difference between the two then only the most partisan people would claim his plan is the better one, but still secretly hope they get fibre. The industry and IT experts are clearly backing one and it's probably best to listen to them, especially Simon Hackett who built and ran the best ISP in the country, not just according to his loyal customers, but also the award as the best ISP they won year after year. I personally believe the only reason Malcolm chose this plan is to protect traditional media outlets including Foxtel as having firstworld quality broadband would be yet another nail in the coffin for them. It simply does not make sense otherwise especially for someone supposedly as intelligent as our PM. Alert moderator

Reinhard: 01 Mar 2016 5:06:07pm They might have the same earnings but the FTTP would have minimal maintenance costs, while maintaining the aging copper network for FTTN has already shown to cost over $700m p.a. Source: BIS Shrapnel - Maintenance in Australia 2012 to 2027 Alert moderator

The Old Shoe: 01 Mar 2016 6:27:04pm Earnings will not be the same, the government's strategic review admitted as much. There was a possibility that NBN Co could earn more in the short term, but there is no way the 2 NBNshave the same revenue profile upon completion. Alert moderator

The Old Shoe: 01 Mar 2016 5:26:22pm Fundamentally untrue. The MTM has higher running and maintenance costs. The MTM has lower revenue potential, as less users will pay for high speed plans. The MTM will need significant replacement to meet growing demand. Etc. How can you seriously think what you wrote? Alert moderator

andyfreeze: 01 Mar 2016 7:13:56pm I have to correct you here. Has the cost of upgrading fttn to fttp been included in your costings? The current plan is not future proof. The future is also in uploads not only downloads. The current plan is so download focused that most people dont realise its limitations. Factor this into your model before talking nonsense. Alert moderator

GreyBags: 01 Mar 2016 10:06:04pm So wrong I'm surprised you felt confident to put it in a public forum. Alert moderator

Benny Wormtongue: 01 Mar 2016 3:45:49pm Turnbull knows he is creating a worthless network and doesn't care how many billions of dollars he wastes building it. At least Labor were building a network that was worth buying by the private sector after completion. Alert moderator

Ted: 01 Mar 2016 3:46:39pm This debacle should be a timely reminder of how we were travelling under an Abbott government. That they launched into a scheme dependent upon the worn out Telstra copper wire and roadside nodes is unforgivable. That it may have been done to protect the Murdoch empire makes it even worse. With Malcolm taking over from Abbott I assumed (wrongly) that he would quietly go back to FTTP. I have lost interest in this government and look forward to its removal. Alert moderator

Brian DC: 01 Mar 2016 3:49:13pm The technical and financial superiority of fibre over copper was never in doubt. It is unfortunate that vested interests have worked against the best interests of the Australian people. Copper cable is 19th century while fibre is 21st century. Using copper for the last hop, however short, is like putting retread tyres on a modern car with ABS, airbags and electronic stability control. It has significant additional costs like requiring a power supply to each Node and the corrosion inherent in it construction. All of this is well known in engineering circles. It's time to accept that the best tech is actually to lowest cost in the long run and produces better data speeds which is what the NBN is actually about.

Alert moderator

Good Grief: 01 Mar 2016 3:51:35pm I agree with the author, but have to extend that our nation building woes are caused by political mud flinging from both sides. Libs come into power and dismantle projects thought by Labor, and Labor return in kind when they come into power. This has been a large issue both on a state and federal level, leading to tax money haphazardly drained due to petty disagreements leading to poorly thought out changes and delays that is costing us by the billions. "Oh but GG, this is the price we pay for a fully functioning democracy, you can't compare it to the inefficiencies of more autocratic nations like Singapore whose infrastructure planning look ahead in the decades" No, we aren't paying for democracy; we are paying politicians a premium (fat 6 figure salaries with fat 6 figure pensions) to behave like highschoolers who proceed to make a fiasco out of large promising projects and call it "savings". We need a policy that ensures that large public projects aren't easily changed with the changing of the guard. Alert moderator

Jean Oliver: 01 Mar 2016 4:43:54pm No, not at all Good Grief. The Libs never had any nation building projects for Labor to dismantle. Labor got rid of the much hated socalled Work Choices and that's all you can record and it wasn't a project other than being part of the Libs kill unions policy. Any change to a large public project should only be one for the better as opposed to destroy the NBN and waste billions. The Libs are all talk and no action when it comes to nation building and economic management. Alert moderator

Good Grief: 01 Mar 2016 5:06:02pm Jean, I am talking about it at all levels. Just last year, Labor came into power in Victoria and dismantled 2 large Liberal projects. First was the highway, which costed 500 million to compensate the private companies who have been awarded the project. The second was a railway project, which was supposed to increase the capacity of trains in one of the lines; in this case, Labor just scrapped the Lib's project and proposed another similar one on a different line. Arguing about Libs and Labor is like arguing about Coke and Pepsi; both emit copious amounts of gas and offer sweet nothings that will kill you slowly, yet people will always vouch that one is better than the other. Alert moderator

memory like a goldfish: 02 Mar 2016 5:45:18am Good Grief your 2nd paragraph is bang on the money. Cheers. Alert moderator

Jean Oliver: 02 Mar 2016 8:50:12am You forgot about the infrastructure the Vic Libs sold and which Labor had to buy back due to the total incompetence of the private sector. The Vic Libs haven't had a decent government in power since Hamer. Scrapping one planned project (not in the course of construction as with the NBN) did cost money due to the rigged contract signed at the last minute by the Libs to ensure the lining of the pocket of their business pal - a disgusting move - but it saved billions. The Libs are just cheap salesmen not builders. Alert moderator

Pavo: 01 Mar 2016 3:52:42pm I have some sympathy for Turnbull. Tony "I-Still-Use-Faxes" Abbott gave him the poison chalice of a dudded-down NBN in the full knowledge that it would be a failure. In doing so he was hoping to bury Turnbull for good. Of course, being the narcissist that he is, dear old Tone never factored in that the whole country would peg him for the hopeless joke that he is, so he got turfed out before the full horrors of this fencing-wire-and-binder-twine, patched-up mess was fully exposed. Mind you, Turnbull should have made the proper NBN a priority. He has the knowledge base to know what needed to be done. One suspects that it was pride that prevented him from admitting that the FTTN fiasco was as bad as it has proven to be. Alert moderator

PlayingSpin: 01 Mar 2016 3:52:45pm Thanks Paddy for your clear, concise assessment of the corrupted and extraordinarily expensive mess we will all pay dearly for hereafter. All so that Abbott could attack Labor over something (anything). Childish, is it not. Alert moderator

John51: 01 Mar 2016 3:53:22pm It is simple, in that Turnbull and Abbott turned the NBN into a political casuality of war in their determination to bring down the than labor goverment. They used lies and misinformation to discredit the NBN so as to discredit labor as economic managers and left us with this third rate version of the original labor NBN. Turnbull and Abbott's tearing down of labor's NBN was all about politics and nasty politics at that leaving this country with a mess when it comes to what should have been the great enabler of Australia's 21st century economy. What gets me is it is regional Australia who largely voted for this government who lost out the most in this lie. Alert moderator

gnome: 01 Mar 2016 3:53:27pm Somewhere in a parallel universe, Conroy's NBN is still running at 10% of promised achievement for 100 percent over the promised price. Reality bites in both universes, but it has escaped the ABC in this one. Alert moderator

MD: 01 Mar 2016 4:49:21pm Get a mouthguard for that bruxism, gnome. It'll save you money in time to come. Alert moderator

RealityCheck: 01 Mar 2016 3:56:28pm Thanks Paddy, ABC/Drum, for this timely expose' of this great betrayal of Australia's NBN by the political chancers who lied about Labor's NBN in order to wreck it for motives of Abbott-Turnbull-LNP delusional vanity and lust for power at all cost to the Australia for decades to come. Thanks too, Paddy, for putting the whole mess into financial and logistics and feasibility perspective for us all to see what this LNP and its "front men" have been doing all along while telling the voters they were the better financial/economic managers! What a travesty. Anyway, we can see clearly now that BOTH Malcolm Turnbull (the then Communications Minister responsible for this mess and now PM) and his current LNP Communications Minister, have been MISLEADING PARLIAMENT in QUESTION TIME when answering Labor's questions regarding the progress of LNP's NBN mess. Worse than that, both Turnbull and his Communications Minister have been LYING TO US ALL out here in voter land. Taking us for mugs. Now we know the extent of their deceit and incompetence, thanks to this excellent expose' by Paddy manning and our ABC/DRUM. Well done once again! nd THANK YOU for being the one honest voice in a sea of lies and deceit by Turnbull, his Ministers, his LNP party. If that doesn't disqualify LNP from election process because of the lies and deceit of biblical proportions, I don't know what does. Not to mention Turnbull promoting Brough while under AFP investigation; and not questioning Robert when his corrupt 'china fraud' was exposed; and the rest of the litany of failures of judgement and standards of honesty and competence. Nothing has changed since Abbott started the ROT in this LNP which this Turnbull has meekly been perpetuating a a PUPPET of the extreme right ideologues to which Abbott belongs. I'm not sure we shouldn't actually disband this LNP fraud (via the ballot box) and for the time being have two major parties, Greens and Labor (at least they have SOME idea about fairness and inclusion) until most of the Elephant droppings have been cleaned out of the main ring of this current LNP circus. Come the DD, vote for anyone except this LNP disgrace. Let's put the fear of god into the LNP this election---vote LNP last on your ballot paper! That should straighten their ethics social responsibility a bit! Good luck in your choices at the next election all. :) Alert moderator

the yank: 01 Mar 2016 3:57:48pm Turnbull runs the government like he did the NBN roll out, a mess. And now Abbott seeing blood in the water is starting to circle, question is will he strike before the election and is Turnbull going to try and go early to avoid that outcome? Alert moderator

Ted: 01 Mar 2016 4:31:09pm I think you are on to something here, yank. Abbott has been more blatant in the last few weeks in proposing alternative government policies here and overseas. He no longer fears being slapped down as he ought to be, possibly because he has been given the goahead by the LNP power brokers. I hope Abbott challenges. It will ensure the end of this government whether he wins or looses. Alert moderator

darthseditious: 01 Mar 2016 7:55:33pm I hope he does too. There are many undecided voters out there who were flocking to labor when Turnbull pulled the carpet from under Abbott and are now agonizing over whether to vote to or against his government. An Abbott counter coup would be just the event to push them into making a decision against voting for this LNP mess. I am sure that Shorten's strategists are watching as well. Alert moderator

ThingFish: 01 Mar 2016 11:48:52pm "I hope Abbott challenges." Won't happen! It's not that Abbott is not so stupid as to mount a challenge, it's that the bulk of the LNP MPs are smart enough to know which side their snout in trough bread is buttered on, if I may put it that way! Alert moderator

John51: 01 Mar 2016 5:07:12pm Yank, it is the vultures who were sitting up high circling smelling the lay of the land who are now coming lower and lower and most of those vultures come from the liberal party. It was so obvious right from the begining that this perverted Turnbull/Abbott version of the NBN, built on a mix of the new parts, fibre, bandaided onto the old worn out copper was going to come unstuck. No engineer worth their salt with put their name to a project such as this, but than neither Turnbull or Abbott's are engineers are they. They are more like snake oil salesmen dressed up as politicians. Alert moderator

Kocsonya: 01 Mar 2016 8:20:00pm > They are more like snake oil salesmen But you have to admit, they're good snake oil salesman. They *are* in government and according to the polls, they *would* be re-elected today. There is a huge demand for snake oil in the population, shocking as it sounds. Alert moderator

Regionalgranny: 01 Mar 2016 4:00:07pm Blind Freddy could detect that the change to the original NBN plan was politically driven. Apparently the political benefits of trying to downplay the policies of their Opposition is worth the small inconvenience of building an inferior and more costly NBN for Australian tax payers. One which will possibly need to be overhauled before it is offered to investors. I am not hopeful, being one of those who has not yet been one of those households to be connected to the NBN, that any NBN connection will be any better than the wireless internet I now have. Being a private user of the internet I can only imagine what businesses, particularly those in regional and remote areas, are experiencing with their internet connection, while those comfortably ensconced in Canberra during sitting days of parliament do not need to concern themselves about such things. Alert moderator

Rhino: 01 Mar 2016 4:01:44pm Proof if you ever needed it that the LNP are fiscally incompetent, technically decrepid Murdock lapdogs. Wasting billions of dollasrs ruining a nation building program so Foxtels cheap and nasty cable TV can still sell rubbish shows full of ads for a fee. Alert moderator

John51: 01 Mar 2016 5:12:09pm Rhino, labor's NBN of FTTP, fibre to the premise was to be the great enabler of Australia's 21st century economy. Instead the Turnbull/Abbott coalition sold us a pig dressed up as mutton. So much for this Innovation PM Turnbull. Innovation needs the right foundations to build on. Alert moderator

Rhino: 01 Mar 2016 5:22:20pm So very, very true. Alert moderator

Mark D.: 01 Mar 2016 4:01:57pm Whilst the thing everyone sees is the problem (Politics) is rather overt, the end of the day is my tax dollars have just been flushed down the toilet because of one party seeking political power at the cost of the nation. Labor, rightly or wrongly, made a choice and did what was best for Australia. I am sure that in hindsight, it could have been done better but that is always the case in any project. LNP made a policy in opposition to attack - not or the sake of what was best for Australia - but "to attack Labor." I do not mind that. But they lied ... and instead of doing the honest thing and say "well it is going to cost us billions to change the project midstream, we will continue with it" - they had to try to justify themselves and dismantle it - and remake it. They said "we did not lie" and thus had to create a second class world where their view of reality prevailed. And I am paying in tax dollars. I prefer honest liars - those who at lest know they have lied. Not the dishonest kind which ... creates the lie and imposes it on reality. It is far cheaper to deal with liars than the self deceived fantasy world "I have not lied" idiots. My tax dollars do not spread that thin. I wonder what would happen if people did not lie? Nah - will never happen. So given we have to live with lies, give me honest liars every time. Alert moderator

Regional Australia: 01 Mar 2016 4:04:13pm This is what happens when public policy goes wrong, and people wonder why politicians are not game to try new policy ideas. This was something, that was a big project. How do other countries do this. One of the big problems for Australia, it is a big place to get around. Would we have been better served, in towns with wireless internet, satellite to remote rural and regional people - communities and towns. People are moving away from fixed lines for phones, so do we need land lines, just for internet. This has been done overseas. This system was not suggested either by Labor or the Coalition. Poorer countries do wireless, and reach more people, and deliver much better broadband speed. Before you race into big projects, it is good, to get perspective. And perspective, is to look at what everyone else has done, before making a decision. Labor's version is more expensive then the Coalitions. Labor's version, made work for a lot of people which is commendable. And Labor will tell you it is the best, as Labor always does. Why did they not trial wireless networks. As people, now don't have a fixed phone line for their phone service, they use mobile phones instead, why did we not follow suite with the rollout of higher broadband speeds. You start to wonder, why people no longer trust the judgement of politicians. They sit there and say this will work, and so on. Then when it arrives, aw, well we didn't glue all the wheels on, we forgot to paint it, it sort of works. This also speaks volumes about the fact, they only think about these policies in terms of big population areas, not will it work around the whole country. And this drives home the point, the people in Canberra, think because they say something is happening, that is all there is, in delivering public policy. Then when the issues come rolling in, they first try to ignore the problem. Then mumble some ideas. However they never go and see for themselves the problem first hand. We are losing fairness in Government in this country, to deliver on its promises. With each successive Government, the ability to see something roll out and work everywhere is lost on the politicians. And something is not successful if it does not work as promised, and does not work in most of the country, therefore its impact in terms of outcome is very overstated, like most politicians. Alert moderator

hoolibob: 01 Mar 2016 4:44:13pm Spot on nice to see we're in agreement on this one. I'm sick to death of the logic that because infrastructure works in piddly little european countries it's got to work here. If it takes 5hrs to get a plane to Perth & an hour to drive through 3 european countries with border stops it should be pretty obvious our infrasture needs to be different. Next time you use your free travel pollies, skip the free drinks on the plane. Really get an education on how big we are. Alert moderator

Jean Oliver: 01 Mar 2016 4:46:08pm Because a 100% wireless NBN is impossible. It won't work. Alert moderator

Mark D.: 01 Mar 2016 5:27:00pm @Jean Oliver I am going to add a caveat to it ... it is impossible "using existing technology" as I do not care to say if other technologies could occur in the future. I remember when the "greatest possible speed" for copper phone lines was a 56 kb/s modem. And it was not so long ago. Alert moderator

David Ferstat: 01 Mar 2016 6:42:00pm A 100% wireless NBN IS, actually, sort of possible. But ... You're going to need phone towers every few streets. And you're still going to need a fibre-optic network to connect those towers to the main high-speed, high-capacity backbone. Each of those phone towers is going to need an electricity supply, and is going to be subject to planning approval from local councils, just like they are now. Which means years trying to get the tens of thousands of towers you'd need up and running.

So, yeah ... a wireless NBN IS impossible. Alert moderator

Chris: 02 Mar 2016 3:04:11am NBN have been placing their antennas on top 500kV electrical transmission line towers within 2 or 3 kms of where I live and my brother who is an installer of satellite and wireless NBN tested the output of the nearby NBN wireless towers for me a couple of days ago. We came to the conclusion that we had a weak signal due to the directional antennas on the towers being faced toward more sparsely populated areas in order to service the areas that will probably never get FTTN or FTTP. The built up area that I live in is not even listed for FTTN in the next 3 years and yet the equipment to give wireless access to the NBN in my area exists but it seems to be configured in such a way as to deny access to most potential users. NBN wireless is not impossible but the mindset of NBN Co thinks that it is all too impossible. Alert moderator

spacey 101: 02 Mar 2016 1:17:38pm I'm sorry Chris, but no. It's physics. There simply is not enough bandwidth for wireless to work as a total solution. End of story. Regardless of future technology the actual amount of bandwidth available will never change. That's all there is to it really. Alert moderator

David Ferstat: 01 Mar 2016 5:03:36pm "And Labor will tell you it is the best, as Labor always does." No, Labor told us was the best, and almost every technical expert told us it was the best. "Why did they not trial wireless networks." Because wireless networks are good for tasks that require little bandwidth, like voice calls. They are not good at tasks that require high bandwidth, like video conferencing, or file transfers. "... why did we not follow suite with the rollout of higher broadband speeds. ..." That's what the new NBN was supposed to deliver. Unfortunately, physics places upper limits on the amount of data that you can shove down a copper wire. Optic fibre, which is what was going to build most of Labor's NBN, far exceeds this amount. Alert moderator

Petrus P: 01 Mar 2016 8:25:15pm "...No, Labor told us was the best, and almost every technical expert told us it was the best..." David, is it possible that you still cannot see that Labor promised a 'pie in the sky' which could have never been delivered in a country with such sparse population like Australia. The best? What does that mean? I assume that a new Rolls Royce would be better than your current car. Why don't you have it? Most probably because your current car suits your budget and still provides for all your needs. In other words, you are a practical person and not a dreamer. C'est la vie. Alert moderator

Kocsonya: 02 Mar 2016 8:33:36am No, it is not a Rolls vs a Ford in *your* garage. It's whether we use horse drawn carriages or trucks to deliver food to the supermarket. Trucks are more expensive and need to have roads. But they can deliver more, deliver it faster and they can even cool the produce in transit. The Turnbull NBN is a delivery system where there are trucks running between depots of large cities, but within the city we use horses, bicycles, handcarts, and at very advanced places some small utes to take the load from the truck to the supermarket. Which one do you think is better? Trucks to the Premises or Trucks to the Depot? Alert moderator

David Ferstat: 02 Mar 2016 11:05:00am "... which could have never been delivered in a country with such sparse population like Australia." Given that numerous technical experts looked at Labor's plans, and considered them achievable, please tell me why I should take your anonymous opinion over theirs. "The best? What does that mean?" Here goes: Lowest operating expenditure. Lowest bandwidth cost ($/MB). Highest bandwidth capacity. Longest service life. Highest potential annual profitability. Highest network value, and hence resale value. Greatest potential for enabling new technologies and services. "I assume that a new Rolls Royce would be better than your current car." An poor analogy. Assuming that, for most people, a car is a means transport, there is little that a Rolls Royce will do that my Hyundai won't. However, if I have a reliable high-performance connection to my house, AND EVERY ONE ELSE HAS ONE TOO, then we now have a market for businesses, governments and education institutions to deploy services that will use these connections. You need to realise that if there is no market of people with high-speed Internet connections, these services will not be developed. It's a case of "build it, and they will come". But if you DON'T build it, they won't. Alert moderator

Ishmael: 01 Mar 2016 5:06:02pm I was wondering how long it would take for some ignorant country bumpkin to mention wireless/satelite broadband. If you feel the need to bring up wireless broadband then you are basically saying "Hey everyone, I don't know anything about this topic but I have an opinion, did I mention Labor are bad?" Alert moderator

anote: 01 Mar 2016 4:04:13pm "The NBN debate remains a giant political" and we can expect Labor to point it out during the election campaign and the Coalition to downplay it where they cannot avoid it altogether. Alert moderator

Thamos T: 01 Mar 2016 4:04:34pm This was a failed project right from the beginning. It was primarily the result of Conroy's fight with Trujillo, Telstra's CEO at the time. To start such large communications company, including the latest developments in the fastest changing industry ever, with no staff and no expertise what so ever, is an absolute madness. Only Stephen Conroy is capable of stupidity of such proportions. Conroy had no idea of the enormity of the task nor the potential costs of the project. No one still has an idea of the eventual costs of creating a huge telecommunications company from nothing; no staff, no expertise and no proper understanding how it was supposed to operate. Stephen Conroy is actually lucky that Labor lost the last election so that he was not fully exposed the fool he is. The problem was 'downloaded' to Malcolm Turnbul, who tried to somewhat minimize the costs and streamline the construction, however the enormity of the task made even his job almost impossible. However, the person mostly responsible for the current state of our telecommunications system and the ever accumulating debt for the NBN construction, is Helen Coonan, the John Howard's minister foe telecommunications. In my opinion, she would be the second most incompetent federal minister ever. Right after Stephen Conroy. She just was not able to make any decision. Telstra offered to build fiber optic network and all it ask from the government was that the government would not use its regulatory powers to enable access to the network to its competitors at below cost price; i.e to ensure it gets commercial return on it investment. Telstra is a telecommunications company, with the expertise and capability to build a network. It already has vast infrastructure to build the network and it could have build it at a fraction of the cost the government will. Had Helen Coonan been competent to make the decision, we would have had a fibre optic network sevral years ago, without any cost to the government, no government's debt and the access to it would be far less than the current NBN. NBN has to make commercial return on its investments and since the NBN network building will be several times what it would have cost Telstra, we will be all paying far more for the access to the fibre optics network. In addition, we, the taxpayers will have to pay tens of billions of debt accumulated by the NBN. Even when sold, NBN will be able to pay only a fraction of the debt accumulated for its construction. That is the cost to the nation of one single incompetent minister. Alert moderator

Trevor: 01 Mar 2016 5:06:19pm "Telstra is a telecommunications company, with the expertise and capability to build a network. It already has vast infrastructure to build the network and it could have build it at a fraction of the cost the government will."

I would not be so sure of that Thamos, Telstra is now a management company that just happens to manage a telecommunications business. All of the expert engineering and construction knowledge has long left. The business savants who got hold of it thought they were an unnecessary cost and these tasks could be outsourced. Telstra, is now run by lawyers, accountants and marketing people. If you want a top job at Telstra the last qualification you need is engineering expertise. Alert moderator

Mark D.: 01 Mar 2016 8:22:36pm The reason Telstra did not invest in optical was actually the way that it was sold off. It could not divide between wholesale and retail as it should have done. The way the legislation was set up discouraged investment in the network as any investment allowed "others" to buy in at wholesale prices without the overheads of the capital investment." The mechanisms set in place to try to encourage competition - did the exact opposite. So economically - the answer was not to invest. Also the head of Telstra was not ... cooperative in any way" when asked to bid. To fix the entire mess - literally creating what ought to have been created in the first place was a government owned "cable" company which ensured adsl for much of the public who could not get it as things stand - and remove the economic impediments to investment and do a "project" to make the entire network suitable for the near future of 50-100 years. In all honesty, I think it would be cheaper even now to waste all the money spent on the LNP version and go back to the "main thrust" of the Labor model. Technologically, it is six of one, half a dozen of the other with the "non Tesltra" model a bit ahead. But in terms of the underlying structure of the business models - it is a great step forward. Alert moderator

dragonfly: 01 Mar 2016 4:05:53pm The ' Innovation and Ideas Boom' Salesman Turnbull lied and continues the lies about the NBN. It has been a mess since he started this sham and only now are they attacking and questioning him about blown out costs, shoddy delivery times and just rubbish projections of speeds and connections. It was a Labor project meant to deliver the Innovations and Ideas into our Countries future. Turnbull turned it into a cheap cracker night sparkler. Promising so much, and only delivering a bit of fizzle , sparks, some smoke and little else. Alert moderator

Chris L: 01 Mar 2016 4:06:31pm The whole NBN argument was one of the more blatant of Mr Abbott's lies during opposition. Anyone with even a layman's understanding of technology knew the original plan would improve the nation and the replacement plan would do nothing but destroy the project for at about the same cost. Alert moderator

Nova4avr: 01 Mar 2016 4:10:05pm I seem to remember when the LNP were in opposition, Abbott was ranting on about Labor's costly NBN scheme & how their expert, Malcolm Turnbull, who has years of experience in broadband, was going to give Australia a fast system at half the cost. So Abbott was lying even then. The LNP's NBN scheme is very much like they are, full of promise & action, but all you get is a second rate, second hand, barely much better than what we already have & at huge cost. So all in all a total failure. It really is starting to look like everything the Abbott/Turnbull mob do is just a total disaster. Alert moderator

Bryan: 01 Mar 2016 4:14:53pm Well done Paddy. At last the ABC is doing it's job and holding the politicians to some account for this appalling waste of tax payer's money. Alert moderator

hoolibob: 01 Mar 2016 4:16:44pm As an online student struggling in a minor remote community on a weak signal 2G on a good day I have nothing but praise for ABC's patience with my many double up posts because I rarely can get a signal to send my posts once without timed out messages. The only thing I want to know is why online students should have to repay govt VET fee loans they've failed because as demand has increased their internet access has got so bad they rarely can open their college webpages. The govt LNP & Labor drew their salaries to perform the NBN. Students should not have to pay for the govt's stuff up. Alert moderator

foolking: 01 Mar 2016 4:27:38pm When Malcolm first gained leadership it seemed like this reasonable man could say to the public" I was wrong and with Labors help we'll return to the best and fastest internet speeds that Labor wanted, it's not about me" Trying to guess how much it would have cost comparatively to the LNP's effort is ever diminishing rings of relevance. The authors point of a rollout to high use areas that can pay is logical. Speaking of ever diminishing rings of relevance this is how the Neo conservatives view politicians and government. Our democracy has become great because of the ability of our public service to deliver expert advise,its independence . Howard recognised this as a threat, a waste of money when you could buy someone cheaper who will definitely agree with you.,then the Public service was banned from talking publicly, and now there are laws waiting for doctors who complain about treatment of patients. Flush out the neo cons, rebuild the independence of the public service and watch us take off as a country. Alert moderator

Reinhard: 01 Mar 2016 4:28:11pm You're asking the wrong question, it should be "what has gone right with the NBN" since Mr Fraudband got his clammy hands on the NBN and sabotaged the future of network. Ever since the myriad of lies and fabrications told about the Coalition and Labor versions of the NBN have been ably assisted by a Murdoch press that has no interest in the reality. I'll never forget his justification for the FTTN and keeping the decrepit copper network, claiming before the 2013 election "We're not proposing to pay them anything....I'm very confident that we can acquire access, ownership if you like, of the last mile copper for no additional payment." How I laughed, and again when he became Communications minister and he was questioned on whether the costs of maintaining and replacing ageing copper infrastructure could end up costing more than the full FTTP NBN. Turnbull answer was "probably the prudent thing to is say it'll cost you the same." I recall as part of my management studies there was a final year class project on Business Communications, my contribution to the project was on the potential of optic fibre to revolutionise communications, that was in 1983 I'm still waiting for the revolution... Alert moderator

Forrest Gardener: 01 Mar 2016 5:15:57pm Don't worry R. Optic fibre is in widespread use throughout Australia and the rest of the world. Sorry you missed it. Alert moderator

Reinhard: 01 Mar 2016 5:44:07pm Forrest the great shame it is that throughout Australia there are bottle-necks where that fibre must funnel through the aging copper network, the one we were supposed to get for free but actually costs over $700m p.a. to maintain. Alert moderator

tomtoot: 01 Mar 2016 5:53:08pm @FG:- You state, "Optic fibre is in widespread use throughout Australia and the rest of the world. Sorry you missed it." Tell me FG just how widespread you consider NBN to be? I'm all ears and eyes FG - Your bull dust will be of interest? Alert moderator

Forrest Gardener: 01 Mar 2016 6:23:48pm TT, go back to Reinhard's assertion that no optic fibre communications revolution has occurred. Take your point up with him. Alert moderator

Steve_C: 01 Mar 2016 7:26:12pm tomtoot... From the article comes - "it had to build the national transit network, the "backbone" of the NBN. This was another one-off, up-front exercise that was expensive but was duly completed and is relied on by NBN today"... which you either failed to read or the words are beyond your current level of comprehension. The national transit network that is mentioned isn't made out of copper wire!!! It's what had to be laid under the ground before any high speed service could be connected to it. It is Fibre Optic!! So Forrest is correct in this instance. Alert moderator

Reinhard: 02 Mar 2016 8:29:27am Steve you should consider a simple rule of thumb for networking, they are only ever as fast as their slowest link. ie Copper! Alert moderator

Forrest Gardener: 02 Mar 2016 9:05:19am Air is slower than copper Reinhard, and in widespread use. That's two technological revolutions you've missed. Alert moderator

Reinhard: 02 Mar 2016 9:22:54am Sensible argument continues to elude you, but do keep trying... Alert moderator

Forrest Gardener: 02 Mar 2016 2:40:23pm Reinhard, first you say there has been no fibre revolution, next you say that copper is the slowest link. I can't help it if you say things that are just plain wrong. Alert moderator

Reinhard: 02 Mar 2016 3:02:14pm Forrest I can't help it if you refuse to make or see sense. Labor started the fibre revolution and the coalition decided to kill it by sending communication through copper bottlenecks. Alert moderator

JamesH: 01 Mar 2016 4:35:26pm Thanks Paddy for all those facts which we already know. Abbott the destructionist and Turnbull the rubber stamp fluffy duck handling the NBB destruction. Alert moderator

whitelephant: 01 Mar 2016 4:37:07pm And these Lib's are supposed to be the best economic managers. Not only have they blown the NBN but they can't even control their own internal finances. The man who was in control of these ripped off the LNP to the tune of, from recent memory $1.5million. How can we let this mob control our money? Alert moderator

the munz: 01 Mar 2016 4:40:26pm To criticise Labors NBN for not starting with the areas that offered the best monetary return is the accountants way of looking at such a large project. An engineers approach is to gain experience and problem solve in light take up areas and refine techniques so that the much larger areas are done more efficiently and cheaply. Mr Turnbull sold the "easy" solution using large amounts of existing wiring. Very bad decision and will cost us all billions to fix. The engineering approach "do it once and do it right". Alert moderator

Trevor: 01 Mar 2016 4:42:06pm The destruction of the NBN and burning of tens of billions was, for me, the first indication that Turnbull was a dud. Prior to the election when he was waffling on about the MTM and how quickly it could be built, I thought, he is only playing politics according to Tony's rules, and if they won, well he would just find a way to back track, re brand and claim that miraculously he could now deliver FTTP and he had fixed it all. I was horrified when it seemed they would actually carry through with their daft plan. I have been involved in telecommunications design and construction for a considerable time and I cannot think of a sillier idea than putting thousands of cabinets on to streets that all require power and backup batteries in them. Especially if you could have designed a network that did not require them. The cost of the power, ongoing maintenance, replacement of batteries, vandalism, damage by cars running into them, will be enormous. And then, finally, pulling them out to put FTTP in will be another cost. But this cost will probably be justified by the reduction in operating costs. They will just hope that it is not noticed that the only reason the opex was so high was for base political reasons. Playing political games with expensive infrastructure that has the potential to increase productivity and assist new industries in getting started, is perhaps, one of the worst acts of vandalism on the Australian economy committed by a political party. Alert moderator

Philip N: 01 Mar 2016 4:42:47pm I live in the area which has the worst internet speed in the country and I am only 42km from the Melbourne CBD (Long Forest). Officially I have ADSL which is supposed to provide me with with the internet speed of 8Mbs, however, I consider myself lucky when I get 0.5Mbs. Over the last two weeks I was getting 0.05Mbs. Yes, 50 Kbs which is less than I used to get from the dial-up (64Kbs)a decade ago. This is a perfect example of the failed policy and the failed politics. My area is not anywhere in the NBN short or long term planning. Therefore, I may get NBN within the next 6-7 years. Telstra told me that the slow internet speed is due to the congestion at the local exchange, however, they consider it 'commercially unjustified' to spend any more money in maintaining their current network, as it will (eventually) be replaced by the NBN. Therefore, I have no option but put up with the internet speed that barely allows me to open my online bank account to pay my utility bills. Occasionally, I have to pay 'late payment fees' because the internet is so slow that the page times out before I am able to open my account. Therefore, when you comment on the adequacy of the Fibre to the node and Fibre to home, or when you debate whether 100Mbs is adequate, please keep in mind that even at the fringes of the major Australian cities, there are people who get 0.2 to 0.3 Mbs - if lucky. This is worse than many third world countries in Asia and Africa. 'The clever country?!' Alert moderator

Ted: 01 Mar 2016 5:12:51pm Your situation sounds like the outskirts of the national capital. I am reasonably OK on weekdays when it doesn't rain but my neighbours have no ADSL and no mobile coverage. Who allowed Abbott and Turnbull to be in charge of this? Alert moderator

gnome: 01 Mar 2016 7:18:02pm It was so much better when Conroy was in charge. Alert moderator

Ted: 01 Mar 2016 10:16:19pm True. Plan A was to replace the copper wire running past our farm with fibre. We would only have had 1k of wire instead of 6 to the exchange. Now when it rains they disconnect our service and search for a less degraded wire to prop the system on for a bit longer. Bring back Conroy. Alert moderator

Forrest Gardener: 01 Mar 2016 5:23:36pm PN, as you say, you are facing an inevitable problem which is an unintended consequence of the great leap forward. The problem is that Telstra will not put money into improving existing infrastructure when that infrastructure is to be decommissioned. The screw up was Labor's. They simply misunderstood the commercial imperatives of Telstra. The current problems are a consequence of the government's attempts to work around Labor's screw up. How much would you want the government to pay to maintain and improve infrastructure about to be decommissioned? Remember to punish the next political party to come up with a grand plan to deliver utopia. Alert moderator

Reinhard: 02 Mar 2016 10:51:21am " The current problems are a consequence of the government's attempts to work around Labor's screw up. " Labor was in the process of replacing the existing infrastructure, while the Coalition's policy is to keep the existing copper network and pay $700m a year just to maintain it.. How can the Coalition's ignorance be Labor's fault ? Alert moderator

Forrest Gardener: 02 Mar 2016 2:43:03pm Reinhard, I explained the nature of Labor's screw up above. Just for you however, as soon as Labor announced that the network would be rebuilt Telstra stopped investing in incremental improvements. The result was the plight of Philip N. Unintended consequences Reinhard. A Labor specialty! Alert moderator

Reinhard: 02 Mar 2016 3:05:39pm Forrest, you are right about consequences, it was Howard who privatised the networks it in the first place, knowing that any govt NBN would eventually have to buy back or replace the network. . Alert moderator

John Hogan: 01 Mar 2016 11:52:07pm Yeah sorry to hear Philip. Your's is one of many examples of why I supported rolling this out to the more difficult areas first. I've had between 1.5 and 20 mbit over the last 15 years and while often annoying, at least it's been there. The author notes this while also criticising it. Fair enough in some regards, but the whole point of the NBN is fixing a market failure. That means doing stuff that the market wouldn't. Specifically, prioritising the provision of decent service to people such as yourself. In the interim, I support a requirement that carriers provide 3g or better SIM connections at special prices. Very special. Telstra's data day resulted in double the normal traffic. I wonder what it actually cost them. Not much is the certain answer. Alert moderator

Iggy: 01 Mar 2016 4:44:21pm There's no point doing Lib's plan on this. It's $50 billion for little if any improvement at all. Best to not do anything, it's just a complete waste of $50 billion. If you are going to do it, then do it properly. Download speeds are in most cases not the issue. They are not great in Aus but not terrible. The issue is upload speed. So hearing Malcolm go on about how you can download three HD streams at a time on his plan is utter bunkum. The concern is not how much i can download but how much can i upload? Can i video conference in HD, etc? My g/f recently moved here from the States (SF area) and ive had to educate her that u cannot simply upload files for backup on the internet in Australia cos it makes the net totally unusable. She was utterly bemused to see how pathetic internet is in this country. It's a disgrace. Alert moderator

Madmax: 01 Mar 2016 4:48:00pm What went wrong? Nothing went wrong. just another Abbott lie to make himself look like he was better than labor The lie worked and he does not care about end results. Alert moderator

John Hogan: 01 Mar 2016 4:56:02pm A good summary Paddy. Free of so much of the nonsense I hear. Look it just needs to be built. Based on even the oldest plans, a complete fibre network, once complete, will already be in need of serious back-of-house upgrades to cope with the projected traffic. And those projections keep rising. At it's heart, this is the same as the NDIS - a program that the coalition inherited that it can't kill but fundamentally dislikes. So they're doing a bad job of rolling it out. The NDIS is going to have huge problems, particularly as people who currently receive significant support are migrated across. Just wait for it. That's to come whereas the NBN's warts are already oozing in a highly public manner. And more than merely causing people to have higher expectations about what life can mean for them, the NBN is a constant, glaring admission that the market failed us over two decades. The price of internet has only dropped to the levels people pay in other countries because of the NBN: The value offers for ADSL etc jumped as soon as the first measly few connections came on line. Ah, markets. But since the inception or broadband, people such as Malcolm Turnbull (really, including Malcolm Turnbull himself) have profited from the painfully expensive rolling out of the communications network that the market wanted. The NBN, presumably and easily the largest government intervention to fix a failed market in our history, is doubly galling for the coalition. So like Homer Simpson, when faced with a job they hate, they're choosing to simply go to work every day and do a bad job. Alert moderator

Zathras: 01 Mar 2016 4:57:23pm The cost of maintaining a rapidly deteriorating copper network was not part of the FTTP strategy, nor the same for the multitude of roadside cabinets needed to support the FTTN network. As well as selling all the copper to NBN, Telstra will be paid to maintain it indefinitely. I've moved from ADSL2+ to FTTN and notice very little difference in performance. The patch-up was a short-term political strategy with long-term consequences. Alert moderator

Forrest Gardener: 01 Mar 2016 5:27:20pm Do a bit more analysis Z. If you are still using WiFi to distribute data around your house, for example, you would not see any difference with a 1000Gbps connection to your front door. Find out how much capacity your ISP has in your area. Do some latency tests to identify the bottleneck. Forget the politics until you've checked the technology. Alert moderator

John Hogan: 01 Mar 2016 11:42:48pm Wrong on several counts Forrest. A terabyte connection would mean negligible latency and very noticeable improvements in connection quality, even over outdated 54g end-to-end equipment. I'm talking about 10 year old routers and an original xp box. There would be no graph - just a solid wall of data. Then there is the equipment being provided with fttn connections. The lowest wifi speed I could find was 450mbit, which in the real world might translate to 100mbit. Even assuming Zathra has a 5 year old laptop capable only of 50 mbit, that would allow twice the bandwidth of the best ADSL connections. I conclude that his home equipment is unlikely to have a bearing on his observation. I also think his opinion about the situation has caused your response to be somewhat prescriptive and dismissive. Anway, A lot of FTTN is only offering 12 mbit guaranteed. I had 20mbit in 2005 over ADSL. Why would you assume Zathras has got this wrong? Politics, methinks. Alert moderator

Forrest Gardener: 02 Mar 2016 9:08:08am JH, you make conclusions based on assumptions and no facts. Alert moderator

mybias: 01 Mar 2016 5:12:49pm "A huge component of the cost of the NBN is debt and the quicker you can earn revenue, the lower your borrowings need to be, and therefore the lower your ongoing interest bill. ..........." Why does the gov't need debt and to pay interest. This is the rort here, we need to investigate who is getting the money. NBN great idea, trouble is the rent seekers all get involved.

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mr chow: 02 Mar 2016 6:39:34am It's normal business for governments to borrow money (issue bonds). And to borrow that money government, like everyone else, has to pay interest. There is no scam here... Although some will argue less borrowings is better Alert moderator

mybias: 02 Mar 2016 9:49:27am Why is it normal business? The government is the creator of money (Or should be). Issuing bonds does not create money directly. The only difference between a bond and money is the bond pays unnecessary interest (For the function of funding gov't expenditure). This is why negative interest rates will become more common. Gov't cannot continue to subsidize the banking system. We have outsourced money creation to the banks. Alert moderator

mr chow: 02 Mar 2016 12:35:27pm That is not the case at all - in fact it's the balance of the RBA - that creates/destroys "money". And the fact is the treasury doesn't have an even flow of money so some level of "borrowing" will always occur even when we aren't running a deficit. I would also say your definition of money isn't exactly correct - there are many different types of "money". And yes the fractional reserve system has allowed other organisation to provide leverage for countries to operate. Alert moderator

Kropotkin: 01 Mar 2016 5:15:27pm What went wrong? The media constantly peddled Turnbulls and Abbotts lies without question and the ABC censored all NBN discussion for 2 years, going as far to censor NBN discussion on live television because the ABC was scared of funding cuts. 2 years with little to no reporting on NBN on the ABC while tens of billions were flushed down the drain. I would love ABC higher ups to explain that. Alert moderator

Rod Rodwell: 01 Mar 2016 5:17:48pm Too many people with insufficient knowledge of megaprojects making silly statements. The only wise and true statement is that it may not get delivered. That is better than the original NBN plan which was impossible to deliver. The Project Plan was never feasible. Either way someone is going to lose a truckload of money. Alert moderator

Trevor: 01 Mar 2016 6:29:37pm With most projects there is also a rule along the lines of; it can be: * Low Cost * High Quality * Delivered Quickly You are allowed any two of those options. Turnbull and co though seemed to have been able to come up with a plan where we get none of them. Alert moderator

TedB: 01 Mar 2016 5:20:38pm Abbott and his boys certainly stuffed Malcolm by giving him this poisoned chalice to have and to hold. It was always a no-win task, but if he won, Abbott won; if he failed, Abbott won - or so conspiracy theorists like me would think. Alert moderator

Bob G: 01 Mar 2016 5:24:33pm This NBN was and always will be another Labor under funded and over resourced pie in the sky thought bubble. It will be too expensive to purchase by most Australians who Labor claimed would be the winners with NBNs introduction. The only thing it would achieve would be that "Big Brother" would be able to watch every move we make. It should never have been introduce, just another school buildings and Lap Tops all round Labor failed operation. You cant blame the Coalition it's just another Labor folly they inherited and another waste that Australia doesn't need. Alert moderator

Geoff2: 01 Mar 2016 6:42:14pm Sorry Bob but I thought the laptops all around was John Howard's thought bubble it came with a speech about no one telling him how to spend money and the manner it was spent Maybe I have been brainwashed Alert moderator

netter: 01 Mar 2016 10:29:20pm "It will be too expensive to purchase by most Australians ....." Wrong. I pay less for NBN (with unlimited downloads) than I did for ADSL 1 (with very limited downloads and a very slow speed). Alert moderator

netter: 01 Mar 2016 10:35:12pm Labor's "school buildings" initiative was not a "failed operation". Thousands of schools continue to benefit from it, and it was long overdue. It also helped to stimulate the economy. I've benefitted from the BER and the NBN. I've had no benefits from the LNP and don't expect to. Alert moderator

Doctor Nik: 01 Mar 2016 5:27:50pm Once again, there is NO mention in the media of the total estimated user-pays cost of Copper Remediation which forms an integral part of the LNP's plan. This alone could run into tens of billions, all paid for directly by the consumer, outside of taxation. So embarrassing was this deception that it was redacted in Turnbull's NBN report, released when he was Comm minister. Add the user-pays component back in, and you get a similar total cost to Labor's NBN proposal, BUT with lower performance, reliability and reach. Alert moderator

W A Pleb: 01 Mar 2016 5:37:48pm "NBN"? What NBN? That is some eastern states thing, isn't it, never to exist for the remote communities, such as the local governments jurisdictions of WA? It seems to be a bit like digital tyelevision - only available, in working form, for the people of the eastern states; here in WA, we can not even reliably get ABC television, especially, I am told, in suburbs of the state capital.

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stephen jones: 01 Mar 2016 5:44:24pm Yes, I knew it would be a dud, and now we can make 2 duds when 1 would suffice by buying subs that run diesel engines that anyone can hear from under a bell. A report last week in The Oz said that we may not get nuclear boats this time, but next. Anyone know where we'll get the money from ? Alert moderator

Fernet: 01 Mar 2016 5:57:32pm To prove the absurdity of the new NBN plan and the slavish adherence to it, we now see any copper cable from the node that is totally unfit for use being replaced by... copper at same labour cost as fibre. Before one argues that an area shouldn't benefit from having it's copper replaced, this is the same plan where some areas will finally be getting broadband in 5 years with existing co-axial infrastructure! Alert moderator

Jodie: 01 Mar 2016 6:01:57pm Poor value is what's gone wrong. Consumers are being asked to pay $10 a month extra for a slower speed (comparing a fast ADSL connection to 12MB/s), with 12 or 24 month contracts, uploads counted and no guarantee of shaping (ie excess usage fees are back from the dead). There are very few plans in the $50 range compared with ADSL. Don't get me wrong, I want the NBN, but I want it to at least be a step across, not a step down. Alert moderator

areyouserious: 01 Mar 2016 7:27:40pm ADSL? No ADSL in my area, ever. I am going to go from a cap of 8GB on wireless broadband for $70 a month to 400GB on fixed wireless when mine gets connected. We will finally be able to have wifi and at least the youngest of my children will be able to have internet access for schoolwork. There are a lot of people just like us who have never had the luxury of a choice of internet options. It would have been nice if this government would have thought of us when they decided to wind the NBN back. Alert moderator

netter: 01 Mar 2016 10:48:14pm On ADSL1 I paid $50 for a 9GB cap + $45 average landline. i.e. $95 / month. On NBN I pay $69.99 / month for Internet & landline bundle with no contract. (TPG) So I am $25 better off per month and can actually watch TV programs and YouTube videos, etc. which I could never do on ADSL. Alert moderator

Lighting Bolt: 01 Mar 2016 6:03:12pm Those that presuppose that the Labor version would have been delivered any better and anywhere near the cost estimates are dreaming. Alert moderator

Trevor: 01 Mar 2016 6:21:33pm The article is using Turnbull's costs for FTTP. IE $73Bn. Which is probably high but still looks like good value compared to what we are now going to get for not much less. Alert moderator

IEH: 01 Mar 2016 6:27:32pm A good critique, Paddy. We well and truly get what we deserve by backing these LNP wreckers with Murdoch directing proceedings behind the scenes for his own benefit. Hopefully when we wake up and revert to Labor's rollout model, we should have a valuable asset of world quality. Why on earth Paddy would you advocate the government flog off another "golden goose laying golden eggs" ? I find it incredulous in your suggestion that we somehow don't deserve to benefit from the income stream derived from such an investment. Unless of course you believe, as our Treasurer does, that "we have a spending problem, not a revenue problem" ? Alert moderator

Ted: 01 Mar 2016 6:40:40pm The two people responsible are Abbott and Turnbull. At today's LNP meeting Turnbull rose to praise Abbott. I was reminded of Julius Caesar. That didn't end well for some of the participants. Then, apparently, Abbott rose to praise Turnbull. This is surely going to end badly for somebody. Alert moderator

Pmarsh111: 01 Mar 2016 6:41:49pm What you're forgetting in your comparison with Labor's rollout is that their's would have doubled in cost and duration as well, so to be on par is actually doing well. Alert moderator

areyouserious: 01 Mar 2016 6:54:21pm Its hard to be innovative without internet access. Or is innovation only for those who live in the big cities with endless options? After 12 years of only having wireless broadband we were pretty excited in my area to be getting fixed wireless NBN. Applied three months ago. Will get it this Friday. We had two kids go through high school with 6GB of internet for the whole family per month at $60. No other options for us and we only live 10 minutes from a provincial city. That was pretty hard when homework and assignments for school needed internet access and I won't even bother with distance ed university study when you cannot view lectures online or other resources. Note to politicians. We are innovative too. Alert moderator

Richard: 01 Mar 2016 6:59:41pm I'm on the NBN, it's great. I think it's a real pity that the rest of Australia didn't get genuine equality of service in this regard. I think that voters are to blame for their lack of vision and selfishness. Alert moderator

Ted: 01 Mar 2016 7:27:41pm But are you on FTTP (the Labor scheme) or FTTN? Alert moderator

Richard: 01 Mar 2016 7:46:27pm Fibre right up to the box in my lounge room, installed before the last election for what it's worth. Alert moderator

Petrus P: 01 Mar 2016 8:10:02pm "...But are you on FTTP (the Labor scheme) or FTTN?..." Ted Labor premised heavens and earth but could never deliver. Labor would have never delivered FTTP to 97% of the homes in Australia. Only people like Stephen Conroy could have promised such nonsense. Even FTTN proved to be too expensive in the countries with sparse population like Australia. FTTP can be provided only in the areas with dense population. Therefore please stop talking nonsense of 'Labor's FTTP.' Alert moderator

tomtoot: 01 Mar 2016 6:59:58pm Your topic/article title 'What has gone wrong with the NBN?' There is little or nothing to say on this subject - This MTM (Malcolm Turnbull Mess) sums it it - NBN was the answer under Labor- Now under this LNP circus we have MTM in place of a scrapped NBN. What a situation of chaos we find ourselves in thanks to stupid policy from the LNP Alert moderator

xstephen: 01 Mar 2016 7:05:26pm I have NBN wireless and find it meets my needs. My experience is few Australian businesses respond to queries via their web sites. Many of course link to an overseas site for details of products - after all we make little now. Seems to me that NBN will just accelerate the amount of business and purchasing going overseas. Sure there will be some winners but I expect overseas people have much more to gain. Alert moderator

d: 01 Mar 2016 7:16:00pm Checked expected date for roll out to my place - unknown! Current price per month of internet without land line almost equivalent to current land line prices. The main difference being in drop out rates of non land line. With current technologies improving so fast I'm guessing the NBN will be irrelevent as a form of communication soon. Alert moderator

Anthony: 01 Mar 2016 7:26:18pm Here in Germany, the fibre-optic cable was linked to our house about three years ago, the junction-box is under the stairs. We haven't bothered connecting up yet as at the moment we don't particularly need the speed, but it's there when we do. As the laid the cable in the street they had an offer to provide the lead-in for free - if'd we'd declined (not really needing it) and later decided it was necessary we'd then have have to pay. Was fascinating to watch - and have explained - how the cable was 'blown' down existing street conduits with compressed-air while he chatted with a colleague in the next street who was waiting for the cable to 'arrive'. Joining the cable ends was also an interesting technology. Bit of a change from soldering as my Dad used to do in his PMG/Telecom days. Mind you, Germany has a reputation for efficiency, but Australia has about a quarter of their population spread over about twenty times their land area. Alert moderator

davros: 01 Mar 2016 7:30:19pm Malcolms version of the MBN is like installing sewage to the end of every street and installing public toilets (or carrying your chamber pot down there). Alert moderator

ian_from_oz: 01 Mar 2016 7:39:35pm The concept of the NBN is to break the oligopoly of the existing network providors. The data throughput rates of 5G will render the need for fibre moot. For NBN to have a business case, it needed to be rolled out quickly, before 5G gets off the ground. This was the point of taking a short cut, in order to capture the market at a price point, where 5G can't compete. At this point, it looks like the NBN will fail to provide competition to the next gen LTE networks. As a result, the existing oligolopy will remain alive and well. The mobile phone providers will be the big winners from the NBN's failure. However, they had a lot of assistance in helping the NBN to die the death of a thousand know-it-alls. Alert moderator

David Ferstat: 02 Mar 2016 12:11:31pm For technical and political reasons, wireless will never be able to replace a physically-connected network. To replace everyone's connections at home you'd need a mobile phone tower on about every second street in metro areas. Even then, they'll still need a fibre-optic backhaul to connect them to the network. But to erect these towers you'll spend years trying to get planning permission, and NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) will stop many of them. Alert moderator

Lance: 01 Mar 2016 7:47:19pm Why is there an assumption that the completed network will be sold? It isa natural monopoly and should remain in public hands.if the network is built with Australian Dollars, and no foreign currency borrowings, then the cost to the taxpayer is effectively zero. Alert moderator

DinkumFair: 01 Mar 2016 7:51:50pm What is rarely discussed is the findings of a Melbourne University study that shows that in the Fibre to the Node model promoted by Turnbull, all of those nodes will consume multiples the amount of power that would have been required to run the Labor model of Fibre to the Premises... enough to require an extra 3 power stations to be built. If you add the cost of 3 extra power stations to the build cost, it will be much more expensive than Labor's version. And then there is the additional power cost which will go on forever. But the whole project would not have been necessary at all, if Richard Alston hadn't stuffed up the privatisation of Telstra. If the wholesale section had been separated before privatisation, and spun off as a separate company, that company would have built the NBN about 10 years sooner. Australia will still be suffering from the Howard Government's flawed strategy on this issue, long after the NBN is obsolete and replaced by something that isn't yet invented. Alert moderator

20+year comms tech: 01 Mar 2016 7:59:36pm I've only been in the game for just over 20 years and called it on the day it was announced. The only limiting factor with fibre optics to date is the technology on either end. In other words, we haven't even scratched the surface as to the ultimate bandwidth of these little tubes of glass. Without interference from EMF caused by lightning and other electrical sources, other than a direct break, who knows what the limits really are. Mobiles and wireless technology are fine for when you are on the go and moving about but, for a really strong network without interference, FTTH was the only way to go. Copper technology that is speed limited and required way more power is antiquated while wireless tech starts to interfere with itself at higher and higher bandwidths. There are a lot smarter people out there with multiple degrees and more experience on the subject but what for when the politicians don't listen and do what they want for only the people 'they' know. An absolute tragedy! Wake up Australia! Alert moderator

Axeman: 01 Mar 2016 8:02:33pm What happened to the NBN -- the Liberal Party was what happened , pure & simple -- think they have all the answers but are they ever wrong. Alert moderator

living-in-dumb-land: 01 Mar 2016 8:05:47pm would just like a constant internet connection that lasted more than 5 minutes Alert moderator

Exporter01: 01 Mar 2016 8:09:09pm Unlike everyone else I'm very happy with the NBN - Going from no ADSL access for a decade under telstra to fixed wireless NBN has been fantastic. The fact that those with no internet were prioritized says alot to me about the equity of the process. The NBN is a brilliant construct dreamed up by Rudd and Gillard and refined under Turnball. When time came to connect there were 100 isp. to select from - this was a Turnball innovation. Using the NBN for business like many in agriculture has revolutionized communication for international trade. Satellite NBN fostered by Turnball has revolutionized robotic mining, irrigation, virtual fencing using CSIRO technology and list goes on. Malcom Turnball knows this network will be worth hundreds of billions to privatise and is a national asset. We certainly are a nation of bloody whingers when I read some of the comments above. Alert moderator

David Ferstat: 02 Mar 2016 12:19:25pm "... refined under Turnball [sic]." You mean made more complicated by Turnbull. "When time came to connect there were 100 isp. [sic] to select from - this was a Turnball innovation." Huh? How is a large selection of ISPs a Turnbull innovation? "Satellite NBN fostered by Turnball ..." NBN satellites were actually a feature of the Labor NBN, and were ordered by that Government. Interestingly, Turnbull, as Shadow Comms Ministers, opposed the satellites. "Malcom Turnball knows this network will be worth hundreds of billions ..." I don't know what Turnbull knows, but a recent independent analysis of the NBN suggests that, at completion, its market value will be about $29 billion, about half the construction cost. Alert moderator

Andso: 01 Mar 2016 8:12:41pm Wait...nation building doesn't stop with NBN. We have the Northern Development Project. As well as infrastructure projects such as the National Highways Upgrade Program, and of course upgrades to our National Defense and spying systems, as well as full implementation of the TPP and the sale of public assets. If the NBN goes a little over budget, we simply make amends by becoming more cost efficient in the other areas of nation building. Alert moderator

swy: 01 Mar 2016 8:31:28pm Last week (to much anticipation) I moved to the NBN from ADSL+. I went with a speed boost of 25/5. What a huge disappointment it has been. The speed is slower than my previous ADSL+ service. I've done a speed test which shows a download speed of around 4mbps, slightly slower than my upload speed of around 5mbps. I am in the process of hopefully sorting it out tonight but if my speeds don't improve, what an absolute waste of money this whole NBN has been. Alert moderator

Jim Wickham: 01 Mar 2016 8:33:52pm While the author is happy to acknowledge budget blow-outs in 2016, he sticks to Labor or LNP 2013 estimates for the Labor version of NBN. Surely there's reason to expect that these would have blown out as well? Alert moderator

Mick: 02 Mar 2016 12:48:44pm Maybe they would have, maybe they wouldn't have. We do have some knowns in this scenario though. Labor's NBN would have been fit for purpose and wouldn't have needed to be ripped up and replaced within the next 10 years in order to get a network that will provide actual benefits rather than one thats only purpose thus far was to score political points for Liberal and one that was more to the liking of Emperor Murdoch. Alert moderator

GreyBags: 01 Mar 2016 9:08:23pm Turnbull was given the task of destroying NBN because the Coalition couldn't stand the thought of Labor being responsible for such a good project. It was pure spite wrapped in the usual lies and smears. The Coalition is rolling out copper. Unbelievable. Next they will make steam cars powered by coal compulsory. I have copper in the 'inner west' and it is crap. Tonight it refuses to load anything that moves. Not enough to even get the ubiquitous pop up ads. The Luddites and the Deniers, the Muscular Christians and The Cult of The Invisible Hand that makes up modern right wing thinking is destroying any chance of developing society for the better. A complete rejection of rational thinking. A complete aversion to any evidence that they find contradicts their delusions. Smiters, not builders. Alert moderator

Maybe....: 01 Mar 2016 9:32:16pm sadly in Australia we've become so dependent upon the Government for so much. Maybe... an option would have been for each of us to pay for our own connection, fttp, fttn, 4G, 5G, whatever, just stop whinging about what someone else should do for us. It would be great to see Australians become more self reliant and less accepting of the nanny state policies holding us back and stop expecting others (the Government) to do things for us. Just a thought Alert moderator

Suomy: 01 Mar 2016 9:37:53pm anyone trying to argue that the liberal plan is better for the country, only uses the Internet for checking email once a week posting antilabour memes to facebook. our current copper system is almost at crashing point (especially since netflix/other video platforms have been released in oz), and the current government has done nothing but delay our access to an Internet service that doesnt take longer to download a movie than it does to watch it. watch, soon the plan will be abandoned altogether, leaving only the select few affluent suburbs with servicable internet, which was probably the plan all along. im betting that turnbull and abbott already have thier fibre connections and really dont give a crap bout anyone else because hey, their properties have benefited from the associated valuation increase Alert moderator

Andrew: 01 Mar 2016 9:52:45pm I have no interest in hooking up to an expensive product that will deliver only marginally better internet speeds than we have now. Labor's NBN was a winner. Turnbull's NBN is a joke. Alert moderator

UnKnown: 01 Mar 2016 10:15:33pm There are delays.... well the last places to get any of it should be the ones that said we don't need the fast internet, that it is just so we can download movies quicker. The 'bush' are still waiting for the upgrades that the blockers got about 3 upgrades ago. OK. ending this rant for now. Alert moderator

Ken of somewhere: 01 Mar 2016 10:18:49pm When infrastructure become politicized the end users and importantly those who pay, us, are the ones who get duddded. Alert moderator

Richard: 01 Mar 2016 10:59:39pm The whole thing reminds me of the Howard-Ruddock dynamic. Personal ambition overriding actual beliefs. You knew all along didn't you Malcolm? But what's the national interest compared to your own ambitions? Alert moderator

David H: 01 Mar 2016 11:17:38pm There is a weak, very weak attempt in this article to address the elephant in the room - namely that in going for a far cheaper FTTN network would be vastly cheaper than connecting the last kilometre to everyone a la FTTH. The weak attempt is that software is more difficult and nodes require power. But the lie in this article is the admission that there is a counter factual argument - what would Conroy's albatross actually have ended up costing. It is discounted in true unbiased ABC style as one would expect. Unlikely regional areas? Wake up and smell the coffee ABC. The NBN started in rural Tasmania which happened to be marginal seats followed by Armidale in Tony Windsor's seat which he admitted himself bought his support for Gillard's minority government. Then this was followed by Fitzroy in Bandt's Greens held seat. The political meddling is obvious. Unlikely? Classic ALP pork barrelling more likely. Alert moderator

Fred: 01 Mar 2016 11:20:11pm Anyone who knows the slightest bit about telecommunications infrastructure could tell you that the coalition's NBN is a cheaper solution to what providing FTTP would have been, in the short run at least. A few things need to be considered when critiquing the current NBN plan. First, the cabling between the node and the premises is the most expensive to lay. Second, the FTTN architecture is extensible. This means that it's very likely that the nation will eventually have FTTP anyway, likely when replacing broken copper cables. Third, regarding the speeds of ADSL services and the resultant preconceptions about the performance of FTTN. Whilst it is true that copper cable degrades and the degradation leads to reduced carriage ability, it would likely surprise you to know that this is not the primary cause of slow internet speeds. What is to blame is the amount of ADSL services on a single line going to the exchange. With so many services on a single line the guard bands are reduced and services interfere with one another (a guard band is an unused frequency range between the frequency spaces of services, such as PSTN/ADSL/1/2/2+, which is supposed to prevent services overlapping and becoming corrupt). So once residents start getting off ADSL and switching to NBN, many of those left on ADSL will observe a seemingly miraculous improvement in their internet speed as ADSL services start being able to use their full frequency range, protected by a sufficient guard band. If you accept that slow speeds on ADSL are a result of congestion mores than the state copper medium, then it's not hard to believe the speeds the government says can be achieved on FTTN, which in the grand scheme of things, is a reasonable speed. TL;DR The last person on ADSL will be getting their money's worth. Alert moderator

Steven: 01 Mar 2016 11:53:49pm So what the author is saying is that Labor should have rolled it out to the rich first and then done the rest whenever... Alert moderator

Russel: 02 Mar 2016 12:30:29am The media coverage of the NBN has been abysmal and it still is. And the reason is that journalists need to understand and report on one simple fact which changes everything: Fibre is inevitable. Fibre is the end game. There is no possible future in which the copper has not been replaced by fibre. Think about it. Everything we build now that isn't fibre, is wasted money. Turnbull wants us to think that in building with copper he saves us the cost of fibre. No, he does not. At best he defers the cost a few years and in the end we end up paying twice. We pay once for the MTM. We pay again to have it replaced with FTTH. This is tens of billions of dollars getting flushed. There are no ifs or buts about it. This government is wasting tens of billions of dollars on a network we will have to replace in a few short years. The pretense that we can continue to use copper for several decades to come is the biggest lie ever perpetrated by an Australian government minister. And unless the media stop wasting its time digging up stories about delays and cost overuns and actually reports the real story - its all a total write off - we just won't get anywhere on this issue. To all the "skeptics" here. I ask you to consider one thing. Why spend tens of billions on a network that will last 5 years, when we can spend fractionally more (even this is now being called into question) and build a network that will be still operating, still continuing to meet any possible growth, still generating billions in revenue per year, 50 years from now? There is no possible future in which what Turnbull is doing can possibly be regarded as anything other than tragic. Think about what we will say ten years from now looking back on the replacement of Turnbull's misadventure with fibre and how we could have spent the tens of billions thrown away on a TEMPORARY network. Alert moderator

phil: 02 Mar 2016 12:51:47am I remember back to a time, in the distant past, A time before telstra was privatised. the engenerring types there wanted to fix up the network, rip out the copper and repace it with fiber all the way to the home, they felt it was cost effective, since copper corrodes and needs to be replaced every ten years or so. But that was not to be, a new government came to canberra and they were more interested in selling off telstra, a major infrastructure project like that would have killed the asking price for telstra shares.

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Paul: 02 Mar 2016 2:32:56am The experts knew it was going to be "much more expensive to deliver than was originally hoped". In fact every single problem raised in this article was predicted by said experts, but no one listened. So who are these experts ? Well basically the entire telecommunications industry, and a vast army of technically minded people who took the time to understand the technology. The only people that believed this mismash of technology was going to work is Liberal party politicians, their lackeys, and the overpaid consultants. Billions of dollars wasted, time and opportunity lost, and an entire country at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the world. 4 years ago NBNco started work in my street, I still don't have a connection. If not for Turnbull's meddling I would. Sack Turnbull, put the current NBNco board in jail. Wasting vast sums of tax payers money is a crime, as is lying about it. Alert moderator

mr chow: 02 Mar 2016 6:29:19am The NBN should never have started as a project. There was plenty of room for the market to roll out high speed internet in the populations "densish" areas. Take a look at TRANSACT in Canberra. Pre NBN and was rolling out. The market should have been allowed to operate and laws should not have been created to give the NBN monopoly power. Take a look at Austin - a city of not even 1 million people. Multiple companies rolling out fibre. Then other commercial roll outs across America. Where NBN (or let's just say OPEL) should have filled the gap is where the market wouldn't go. Rural, low density areas. By creating a monopoly we slowed down any chance of a commercial roll out (Austin started it's rollout in 2010) - sometimes government should get out of the way - this was one of those times. Alert moderator

Jack II: 02 Mar 2016 6:38:26am PM Malcolm Turnbull always talks pretty, and gets things half done or fails. That's just him. The coming high bandwidth Wifi type systems will make fibre and copper networks almost redundant for most domestic use. Alert moderator

Alexander: 02 Mar 2016 9:59:04am WiFi will never replace copper or fibre media. The bandwidth is shared with all people connected and deteriorates with connection density and building density. It is ignorant of the realities of physics to say otherwise. Alert moderator

Alexander: 02 Mar 2016 6:50:23am Follow the Money. Who stands to profit. FTTP was an infrastructure that would have lasted 30-50 years. FTTN-MTM has a lifetime of maybe 10-15. So as a Not-for-Profit Government Entity which should have been a better choice for NBNCo? FTTN $40b for 15 years @ $2.6b/year FTTP $73b for 50 years @ $1.5b/year Even using the least optimal of the estimates shows the best investment of the Australian People would have been FTTP. There is no pressing Business Case to shorten the RoI for a Government Entity that is Building Infrastructure. Infrastructure should be a long term generational investment, not a short term business interest. Alert moderator

Bearded Bob: 02 Mar 2016 7:24:27am A major failure in the NBN was the reporting being conducted about it by the Main Stream Media. Private media companies fear the NBN as a functioning NBN provides an alternate platform for their products. Murdoch fears the NBN because it undermines his pay tv model and would see his sport monopoly destroyed by anyone with a mobile phone. But by far the biggest failure was the reporting of it by the right wing controlled unAustralian Broadcasting Commission who refused to let their own technology reporter Nick Ross inform the AUstralian public of the technology failure that is the NBN under Malcolm Turnbull. An informed public would have put pressure on the government to spend their money in a productive manner. Alert moderator

Paul: 02 Mar 2016 7:48:32am The original NBN made technological and financial sense. It paid for itself within a decade after completion. It set us up for decades of incredibly fast Internet that would improve education, health, business and more. FTTP would have lasted decades. This horrid FTTN will need to be replaced within 10 years. By the time it is built it's obsolete. Sure Tony Abbott started this nonsense, but I thought a Turnbull government might opt for RATIONALISM and technology instead of political absurdity. FTTN will be the biggest white elephant Australia has ever seen and cause a significant digital divide in the community. Leaving regional Australia behind while inner city suburbs have acceptable service. Turnbull should be ashamed on this. It demonstrates he is unfit to lead. It wasn't Abbott's stupid idea after all. Alert moderator

Exploited Tax Payer: 02 Mar 2016 8:03:49am Many people seem to assume that the problems just lie with politicians. People should remember that politicians come out of the same population of people as the regular voters. Greed, selfishness and laziness are not just for politicians. The actions of everyday people who work for or with the government is killing the nation far more than any political party can. The civil service, the owners and workers of business that work for us, the people (through the government), far out number the politicians in numbers and harm done to the nation. 1. What if civil servants did their jobs and write contracts to protect the country from being exploited by greedy people out to exploit everybody? Can anybody tell me why they think the NBN will not have blown out costs and timelines when they do not have any high level PLANS or TARGETS for completing the work? The available plans only cover a tiny portion of the whole nation or job. When they cannot tell which tradesmen are able to deliver their work on time, on budget to high standards? We do not need more excuses. We need people who can make reasonable plans and work to those plans - on time and on budget to high standards. 2. What if civil servants did their jobs more efficiently and effectively? Do you know that it can take the immigration department 3 FULL MONTHS to work with a town council to set a date for the citizenship oath taking ceremony - sometimes longer? Passports on PRIORITY processing takes TWO FULL DAYS. Countries like Singapore and Malaysia can do it on the SAME day and that is NORMAL processing times - NOT PRIORITY. 2. What if the greedy people out to exploit the government remember that the government money is everybody's money, and they are exploiting everybody around them for their own selfish gain? A simple paving job in Macquarie Park took months longer than the tradesmen advertised to complete by almost 6 FULL MONTHS. Renovations on the residents of the Prime Minister, the Lodge, is said to have been blown out by millions - perhaps as much as 5 to 8.8 MILLION dollars. The NBN is another example of greed and laziness on the part of people trying to exploit the government. It is time for ALL Australians to realise that we can make or break the nation. We have as much a part in making this nation great or yet another failure, as the leaders that we elect. Alert moderator

Stu: 02 Mar 2016 8:04:12am Sure. The government/s miscalculated the cost and as well as the reality of accomplishing it. For starters, I've dealt first hand (as a client wanting to receive NBN) and have to say that I've never seen such a load of BS from all companies involved. The technicians by any standard are unprofessional in there installations, non compliant to time schedules and lack of communication, ha communication.....!? That's another story. They leave messes after they install the NBN Co. Box (NBN co is a entity without competition, where's the ACCC on that one?) Let's face it, the next problem really is Telstra. Telstra has screw the public with the ownership of the we own the 'lines' (and the asbestos boxes) blah blah blah and ps thanks for the bail out so we can charge a excruciating amount for a FN dongle while people wait months for NBN. Did someone say my area was NBN ready? Actually no it was NBN wait 2 months. They're selling something that doesn't exist or work in some cases (again. Where's the accc on that?) It's obvious that it was always going to be over cost. The tradies are taking the piss. NBN Co is taking the piss. Telstra is taking the piss. What I want to know is since when has a few billion dollars been small money? Alert moderator

Chrisroutley: 02 Mar 2016 8:13:36am Experience in NW SYDNEY shows that fibreoptic itself has some pretty drastic limitations, whatever the boffins might say about theoretical capacity. There, even phone calls just cut out when the data loads build up. ADSL thru copper is so much faster than most of us need. Let us keep the copper for a decade or so to allow a bit more development of interfaces at relay junctions and the like. Real life performance is not satisfactory yet. Alert moderator

Neil: 02 Mar 2016 8:21:13am It's a government department, or course it's politicized. The fact of the matter is, neither side of government knows how to do this. Labor's rollout was in much bigger trouble than you allude to. The current rollout is too much of a hodge podge. As for many of your other comments, as someone close to the telecommunications industry, you seem to be well off the mark. Finally, this article reads as someone who as a viiew on what should be implemented, rather than an objective piece. Alert moderator

Ration_citizen: 02 Mar 2016 8:25:03am OK a few background points. I started when network speed was 300 BITS per second on dial up. Yes I was also using acoustic modems. What the problem is that unless we get FTTP and not be limited to a meager 25MB/s but open it to a viable 1000MB/s we are going to be third world. Another point is that the NBN will NOT allow anyone, expect TPG and Optus that are expanding their network, to lay their own fiber and connect in. Look at the coverage map of Australia. Why stop a group of people funding their own fiber expansion and getting that added to the network. For example Anna Creek station is generating far more income for Australia than Adelong NSW. But they are going to be "generously" given a limited data satellite connection. Best option would be to allow those that want to have FTTP be able to fund the last distance from the FTTN to their home themselves and that if you want to lay your own, and at the sped you want to transmit at, you can and it can be added to the network. Obviously the laying would have to be by certified people or teams. Alert moderator

tonyJ: 02 Mar 2016 8:29:24am The destruction of the NBN is another "smash Labor" Abbott policy which achieved success. We forget that when Abbott appointed Turnbull as Minister of Communications he declared publicly that Turnbull's mission was to "destroy the NBN". It had to be destroyed because it was a Labor initiative which might succeed. Turnbull and Abbott achieved their objective. Turnbull is now living with the consequence of that. Unfortunately - unforgivably - he seems to be getting away with his vandalism. Alert moderator

Lee m: 02 Mar 2016 12:11:01pm `Rivers of Gold" Yes folks you heard it! Telstra and Optus shareholders rejoice. Hundreds of millions to buy dying copper network then pay Telstra to maintain it. Why? because the Fibre NBN presence is to much threat to Optus, Telstra and "Pay TV ". The deals been done to nobble the NBN, so cable internet can be that much more above the diminished NBN. So long as the movie moguls have a superior delivery speed that's all that matters. It is a sick joke, and the economy will only be the worse for it. Alert moderator

Geoff B: 02 Mar 2016 8:36:27am Once again it seems by leaving the use of the tax payer's dollar to politicians to spend we get an inferior product that does not meet expectations, does not meet "planned" time lines, is over budget and probably will end up in the scrap heap within the next 5 to 10 years! Of course there will be the farce of a Royal Commission (at an additional cost to tax payers) with a contrived agenda and full of finger pointing be tween the political parties... and it will all go away until the next time. It's about time the Commonwealth Government when, embarking on theses huge infrastructure projects, put forward well documented and sustainable business cases, gained bipartisan support and locked in contracts and supported those contract with tight contract management processes. The Tax payer deserves a value for money outcomes not "wishy washy" / half baked services that result in outcomes that are no better than what was originally proposed to be improved. Alert moderator

Alan: 02 Mar 2016 8:37:32am This article is a load of malarkey. The author obviously has no technical qualifications or basic knowledge of telecommunications. The so called "copper network" does not use copper wire to the home. The old wired network was put underground in the 1960's and used iron wire to the home because at that time it was only used for voice telephony. Voice telephony only requires the use of low electrical currents (a few milliamps) and iron wire could easily carry these low currents. Copper wire is far more expensive and is (because of its low electrical resistance) only needed when high currents are used. The data rates (megabits/second) required for most home use are quite low. I have a 5 Mb/S over the old wired network connection and I am able to stream movies and websites to my TV with no problems. The simple reason is that when I am streaming a movie and watching it the movie frame rate is much slower than the 5 Mb/Sec download speed. The movie is downloading much faster than I can watch it and to control this the computer (or set top box) is storing the data being downloaded in a 'buffer' (memory allocated by the hard drive) in the background. The download finishes long before the movie finishes. Talk of high gigabit speeds to the home via fibre connection is just not correct. There are 2 parties involved in a data transmission the sender and the receiver and just because you can receive data at 1 gigabits a second does not mean that someone can send it to you at that rate. Because of the multilayers (software and hardware) in a TCP/IP network it is unlikely that data will reach the home at more than 100 megabits/second. So fibre to the home is a very expensive overkill. The author of this article seems to be influenced more by politics and his own emotions than technical expertise but as far as journalism goes this seems to be the norm. I don't expect this comment to be published because truth is not what some people want to read. Alert moderator

David: 02 Mar 2016 9:46:10am The copper network uses copper. Go dig up your "iron" wire and check. Netflix recommends 5 Mbit/s for high definition and they have an increasing number of programs available in ultra high definition, for which they recommend 20Mbit/sec. Broadband speeds have been increasing consistently for the last 20 years, and there is no sign of that stopping. If you have a couple of users in the home or use cloud services you can already easily saturate a 100Mbit/sec connection. Overseas, there are already millions of subscribers with Gigabit/sec connections. You have no idea what you are talking about. Alert moderator

Alexander: 02 Mar 2016 10:15:56am Oh Dear Alan... umm, Steel Wire was only ever used in very rural areas where it was required to be under high tension, the network is copper and has been copper for a long time. Due to ductility and corrosion issues it is extremely unlikely anyone planned to use iron wire, or even steel, which is what think you mean, but anyway... You also don't seem to appreciate that streaming is different to downloading as far as network load goes. Do some homework maybe, or try to be more articulate in how you express what you think you know. It is good to see that you seem to appreciate that we have asymmetrical connections, but that is only relevant if we want to talk about Tele-Medicine or other high bandwidth applications that simply cannot exist on our current highly asymmetrical antiquated systems. Do we need FTTP now, honestly no. Will we need it in 10 years, maybe. Will ADSL2n+ on our ageing copper network be adequate in 15 years, certainly not. The issue is that the FTTN-MTM will need to be upgraded as soon as it is finished, a FTTP would last 30-50 years, like the Copper phone network lasted. FTTN is like saying that no-one needs and individual phone line, a party line is fine for most people. Alert moderator

Lee McCurtayne: 02 Mar 2016 10:30:05am Your comments are aimed at "The Home User" and what seems to be good enough.There are a legion of applications that demand capacity,bandwidth and speed. Industry is hardly mentioned for online commerce which is growing at an enormous rate. The future will be more and more digitally delivery. Just good enough is not how Europe or the US sees laying down infrastructure for a burgeoning future. Alert moderator

YouKnowNothing: 02 Mar 2016 2:57:08pm Another "know it all" with a lack of vision. If I had a 1gbit link today I can saturate the link both download and upload simultaneously. It seems like you can predict the future, tell me what happens in 10-20 years time when quantum computing takes off. The amount of bandwidth and possibilities will be endless. How will the copper support such advancements in technology. The ADSL we have will not even cut it. Singapore already rolling out 10Gbit links through out. We are all still using 10Mbits per second, 1000 times slower. YouKnowNothing. Alert moderator

Griffo: 02 Mar 2016 8:51:53am What went wrong? Exactly everything the actual technical experts said would go wrong. Not the politicians and political hacks, but the actual people with experience in building broadband networks. Go back to the pre-election commentary and read it again. What was obvious to the wise now seems to be a suprise to the sheeple who read what News Corp posted and decided to believe in Tony and Malcolm over Quigley and co. Alert moderator

roydsy: 02 Mar 2016 8:58:29am I am a swing voter, and no I didn't vote for these economic rationalist turkeys into government namely the LNP. The ridiculous thing is, they couldn't be further removed from their core values at the moment with no regard for cost, just focused on negatively smearing anything labor. Based on the ego's of Abbott and Turnbull, we now have a expensive 2nd rate solution that most people don't want or need due to existing ADSL2+/4g tech. I live in a regional area and connect by adsl2+ and get 14mbit already which isn't enough for our household of 4. Yes, that is above average speeds for the technology in a regional area, but the jump to 25mbit would probably not compel us to move to ftn. Unfortunately, my area isn't going to get the nbn anytime soon (eta 2018 I believe). There will always be people not willing to be an earlier adopter and pay more for faster speeds, but make no mistake, build it and they will come. Just look at the impact that Netflix had on usage. We all know the LNP FTN solution is focused on stiffling speeds and giving their key donor's interests a chance to adapt. (foxtel) Alert moderator

David: 02 Mar 2016 9:17:19am Did anyone mention Labour also commissioned the Satellite's which Turnbull scoffed at and said it was another "Rolls Royce", but when it was launched he was happy to have his mug in the paper. This was a major one off purchase as well. I'm sure those who use this service will be glad after suffering for so long. Oh and as a sidenote Turnbull wanted us to rent space from a private sat that was already oversubscribed - which subsequently went out of business. Sometime the Australia people need the rolls Royce and deserve it too! Look most air craft engines are built by Rolls - would you fly with anything less? I think not.. Alert moderator

dream theatre co: 02 Mar 2016 9:26:49am A cost benefit analysis and feasibility study done by "engineers" would quickly show that both Labor and Liberal plans are unfeasible...and bonkers The NBN became a political trophy, at least in 2010-2013...it was who could 1up eachother.. it got votes..back then political issues were BORING.. but wait.. now people arent interested in it no more.. no more votes to swing... we are talking Negative Gearing and Property home ownership now...Gender issues marriage equality, mining bust etc etc no one cares about Broadband. okay guys youve wasted billions, time to put a bullet in the head of NBNCo, its only going to get more money and produce nothing Alert moderator

Lee McCurtayne: 02 Mar 2016 9:43:48am We should have had the right to pick and choose what was affordable from the the curb to the home. Obviously the copper lifeline is hardly a 21st century option, and having the ability to deliver any time, the customer wants to up grade, is the key to be commercially attractive to network buyers. I don't think that the NBN in its current form, would be bought by any sane provider. Now that really is a complete waste of tax payers money. Alert moderator

Ian: 02 Mar 2016 10:24:30am FTTN is a dud. 35% of all connections require a new copper line to be connected. In 2016 that is a disgrace. They could run fibre from the node cheaper. FTTN under the PM's model, is destroying the digital future of the nation. Alert moderator

Chris: 02 Mar 2016 11:06:01am Do it once. Do it right. Do it with fibre. Alert moderator

Buffering...: 02 Mar 2016 11:15:17am Thankyou Aunty for publishing an opinion article on the NBN. It is a pity you didn't let your reporters publish the facts of this unfolding disaster in the news and technology sections at a time when the electorate could have made an informed decision. At a time when policies could have been analysed purely on technical and economic facts and one identified as a clear non-starter, the ABC failed to act without fear or favour. Alert moderator

Contributical: 02 Mar 2016 11:16:34am What an clear example of right wing political ideology getting in the way of true development, true national progress. It is just so very wasteful. Alert moderator

Mark: 02 Mar 2016 11:18:48am I've just got the NBN at my place after a decade of crappy wireless with satellite before that and I'm only 5kms from the exchange and 45kms from Brisbane so hardly out whoop whoop... I couldn't care how they got it to me or the politics behind it but 25+ MBs speed sure beats between 1.5 - dial-up speeds I was getting! Call me selfish, but I'm just glad I have the same or better internet now then you in the city so excuse me whilst I leave and start enjoying my TV on demand and YouTube surfing ;) Alert moderator

LDK: 02 Mar 2016 11:19:51am It's important to remember two things in this debate. 1. Labor's original plan was revolutionary, and an act of political vision far beyond anything else we've seen from either side in decades. Even with the inevitable stuff-ups along the way we would have had a world-class piece of infrastructure morer relevant than anything built since the Snowy Hydro scheme. 2. Tony Abbott hated it, probably because the ALP came up wth it. He also hated Turnbull, and wen in office saw the opportunity 'to destroy both with one move. Castrate the 'all fibre' option, demand a copper monolith that's outdated before it's installed, and make Turnbull the Minister for this massive mess. The third point of course is this: we are stuck with appalling computer speeds as we enter the computer age, and the politics will keep it that way for a generation. Alert moderator

Mic: 02 Mar 2016 11:26:03am Reading through the comments in here.. it's no wonder it's in the state it's in. Supporters from both sides of politics pointing fingers at the others. People who quite obviously have no understanding of the fundamental concepts speaking as if they're experts. An electorate that doesn't know what they're being sold and doesn't seem to want to be educated on. * Labor's plan was ambitious and likely would have cost a whole lot more than they budgeted. * The LNPs version is technically vastly inferior, probably won't be all that much cheaper to deploy but will certainly cost a lot more to maintain. * The Fibre version right now is capable of 1gigabit per second throughput - as fast as copying straight between two computers at home or school or in the office. Most 'LAN' connections these days are the same speed as that. * The equipment to increase that by another ten times already exists, and is already being deployed elsewhere in the world. It's a simple upgrade to the existing fibre NBN. * The copper version depends on the quality of your phone line. Most connections seem to be capable of around 50 megabits per second: 1/20th of the fibre version. At best, it doubles that. * The technology used for that is cutting edge (as far as copper goes). Increasing speeds relies on technology which is at present purely theoretical. * The HFC networks in place in numerous capital cities is currently capable of that same 'at best' 100mbit. The tech used here is quite different though, and that speed is more of a policy than a hard rule, but in order to reliable increase those speeds, you need to have less people on the network, which takes significant rebuilding of it. * Wireless is not an option as a 'baseline' deployment - since all the signals are broadcast everywhere, every additional user in the same area takes up the bandwidth available for everyone else. It's fine for 'test cases' and small numbers of users, but trying to put an entire neighborhood onto it very quickly congests. * No, we don't use satellites to get overseas. We use cables. Big thick bundles of fibre-optic ones with lots of armour around them. Remember the old "live via satellite" interviews with all those gaps in them that prevented people from having a proper conversation? Same thing. It takes a long time to get into space and back down, even for a radio wave.

My own opinion is that with it being something of a flagship policy of the ALP while they were in power, the Libs gladly used it as a wedge issue while in opposition. It was attacked ruthlessly with anything that would stick, true or not. Having invested so much capital in that strategy, they couldn't walk away from it once in power. Neither Turnbull nor Abbott are idiots, both are no doubt aware that the original plan is the most logical one for the long term.. Unfortunately it's not something they can go back to without in Alert moderator

Nick: 02 Mar 2016 11:43:41am The supposed party of the Business community. Made up of the commercially astute, elected on a message efficiency and cost effectiveness in government. Guilty of the very worst excesses of waste in government project delivery. Alert moderator

purgatory: 02 Mar 2016 11:47:20am It would appear Rudd and Conroy's back of the envelope policy was more accurate than the LNP's 'independent', expensive, comprehensive audit and revision which took many, many months to produce a large, unwieldy document. And yesterday it was Turnbull claiming the ALP lacked intelligence in QT! Alert moderator

2litre: 02 Mar 2016 11:50:59am I guess it would be fair to assume that he author of this article would have a fair amount of detail on the NBN if he wrote an unauthorised biography about Mr Turnbull. The main problem for NBN having discussed the topic with an ex Telstra engineer is maintenance and power. The hub boxes require power to cool the system it's not unusual to have maintenance issues due to overheating and water ingress. Having old copper is also a maintenance issue as the fault has to be found which is not easy to do in some areas. Fibre optic cable has few maintenance issues and would not require power if installed direct to the home, it can also survive harsh treatment and will likely still work in a disaster, Telstra's old copper network is urgently due for an upgrade because of it's used by date, Telstra would likely have been required to replace copper with fibre if not for the political machinations of the NBN started by Senator Stephen Conroy to reset PM Rudd's kudos which had started to wain. Considering the period of aspirational idealism that influenced Rudd's big budget policy initiatives at that time the NBN was always going to end up as a political credibility fight between him and Mr Abbott and this was duly passed on to Mr Turnbull who was given the communications minister job as a kind of poisoned challis by Abbott. If Turnbull should succeed with downgrading NBN it was another knife in Rudd's back, but if he failed then Turnbull was finished politically. Turnbull did not fail, his background in IT gave him the advantage even though his own website was full of critical comment about the assumptions being given about the cost of NBN, this shows that Turnbull was playing a kind of double game allowing an open forum on the subject, he knew that NBN was the way to go and would likely have supported the idea if he remained opposition leader. Ironically PM Turnbull is now stuck with his own monster because the coming years will require most of the installation to be redone to original NBN specification and my guess is that Telstra will be doing it with substantial government subsidy, the continuing technology demands for higher data speeds will demand it. Alert moderator

Rosall: 02 Mar 2016 12:08:33pm Well we have Collins class submarines that are useless and cost us billions, NBN well what a mess again costing us more billions, 12 new submarines here we go again costing us billions and no guarantee that this will not be another mess, why not lease American Virginia class attack subs from the yanks? at least they work and have the Punch not like Judy we currently have or will get, just another political mess awaits us and the taxpayer foots the bill like lambs to the slaughter what a joke??? Alert moderator

gaznazdiak: 02 Mar 2016 12:09:21pm Regardless of the physical format of the NBN, or who builds it, there is one group who seem doomed to remain disadvantaged. The roll-out push appears to be totally focused on the cities and those in extremely remote areas and completely ignores those of us who live in non-remote rural areas. I live on a property between Goulburn and Canberra, serviced by a copper based local exchange that is so ancient it can support nothing faster than dial-up. According to the NBN Co, phone companies, Gov etc, there is NO roll-out projected for areas like mine in the foreseeable future, and if I wanted faster internet my best bet would be to wait until another dedicated satellite is launched. I'm not holding my breath. Alert moderator

Equis: 02 Mar 2016 12:36:38pm The ALP plan for the NBN was to roll out to regional areas like yours first b/c the technology was so old relative to the cities. Welcome to the new world order Alert moderator

David H: 02 Mar 2016 1:37:43pm It is not just you mate. I live in Surry Hills, seven minutes walk from Central Station and there is no roll out scheduled by the NBN for my hi tech, internet heavy inner urban area. But this is not a marginal seat so the original NBN roll out schedule would have has it well down the list of priorities. Alert moderator

Stephen: 02 Mar 2016 12:40:48pm Just sums the whole debacle up!! When i inquired recently about getting NBN at my 'brand new home', where i cant even get ADSL1, I was told by email and i quote..."You will have NBN by 2020." At this rate it may well be 2200!! Great and here is a company that cant even get my suburb correct in their database. Yes, I live in a thriving suburb South West of Sydney....not whoop whoop. Although some may beg to differ! But if i listen to Turnball , I should just move house!! Alert moderator

Judge Pencil: 02 Mar 2016 12:55:06pm Mr. Abbott - who is not 'up there' in the long-term thinking department - or any other department for that matter - bears about half of the responsibility for the mind-numbing decision to stop at the node. Turnbull, who should have known better - carried Abbott's easy but flawed message of cost v benefit to the market. It was complete nonsense then - as it is now. Last I checked Australia came 44th in terms of Internet speed which is unacceptable in this second decade of the 21st Century. The socalled 'Tyranny of Distance' can be overcome by light-speed technologies - but Malcolm, Tony et al, have elected to stick with coal-fired steam power and horseless buggies. And these blokes are running our country? Fire hose to the front gate - drinking straw to the house. That's a failing grade decision.

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Christine: 02 Mar 2016 1:12:25pm Not a privatised, so called government operated place, by any chance? Alert moderator

Tarashankar: 02 Mar 2016 1:24:52pm Did the successive governments do a thorough SWOT analysis of the project in every city and town, or was it just a one size fits all project? NBN is a huge waste for residential suburbs and villages where no realtime access to data or processing is paramount for Internet use. Alert moderator

ssouthurst: 02 Mar 2016 1:43:25pm What went wrong? It starts with it being run by a bunch of incompetent people, who have hired another (largely) bunch of incompetent people to design and implement their network. I'll bet a large part of the cost blowouts and implementation delays will be attributed to the inefficient practice of getting unskilled labourers to do the work, then having slightly less unskilled labourers fix the work, and so on... Add to that the fact that the engineers designing the network have all come from Telstra (aka lets sell far more than we can actually provide) and it amounts to the shambles that we currently have. I live 10km from Ballarat and only 3km from one of the largest fibres in Victoria (Melbourne - Adelaide Fibre) and they gave me Wireless. Wireless was (note the was) brilliant at first. Now, in around 12 months, it's worse than the ADSL ever was (and it was shocking). All the emphasis is on "do it fast" rather than "do it right". Alert moderator

Dave: 02 Mar 2016 2:16:31pm We only have ourselves to blame, after all we did vote them in with this being one of their main election issues. And by we I mean everyone who voted for the coalition. Alert moderator

Brenton Forrest: 02 Mar 2016 2:25:14pm There are a number of problems here, but there are 2 points that must not be forgotten: 1 - This is probably the largest single nation-building exercise that Australia has ever engaged in, far surpassing the Snowy Mountain Hydro Scheme; and 2 - Somehow, Turnbull managed to stop Abbott killing the whole project simply because it wasn't a Liberal idea. Turnbull would have known that fibre to the node was less capable than fibre to the home, but he also knew that Abbott was a huge sufferer of the 'not invented here' syndrome. I wonder how he did it? My money's on a club with nails in it. So, Australia will wind up with a less capable network, which will still buy us some little time to upgrade to what Australia needs to have, before the old copper network collapses under the strain of a load it was never intended to carry. This year, we need to elect someone who has the good sense to see that this will need to be done, and who won't play politics as usual with it. Alert moderator

ss: 02 Mar 2016 3:02:37pm Because Tony Abbott didn't understand it and didn't want it because it was a Labor project, we as a nation didn't need it. Abbott is all about holding Australia back, that's what pro-British leaders do. Just look what Menzies did. Alert moderator Comments for this story are closed.