Coalition's NBN a "bad deal" for Australia

The Coalition’s national broadband network is a bad deal for Australia, said University of Melbourne Emeritus Professor in Electric and Electronic Engineering Rod Tucker. It will be so slow that it may be obsolete before it is in place and cost about the same as the Labor fibre-to-the-premises network it replaced, said Professor Tucker. “The nbn won’t arrive on our doorsteps any sooner. By my estimation Australia didn’t get a good deal,” he said.

“My research on internet speed in Australia and other countries shows that FTTN technology — a key part of the Coalition’s MTM [multitechnology mix] — won’t meet the needs of Australian broadband users,” he said.

“Australia’s broadband capabilities are falling behind our international peers,” Professor Tucker said.

According to internet companies Ookla and Akami, Australia’s broadband speed lags well behind other advanced and even emerging economies. In 2009, Ookla ranked Australia’s average broadband download speed as 39th in the world. Since then, our international ranking has steadily declined and slipped to 59th place earlier this year.

“Fibre-to-the-node technology will guarantee that Australia is an internet backwater. Our world ranking could fall as low as 100th by 2020,” he said.

“It is not just a matter of speed just for speed’s sake. International studies have shown a strong correlation between GDP growth and internet speed,” he said.

Before the 2013 election, the Coalition claimed that their proposed multitechnology mix network would cost less than one-third of Labor’s FTTP-based NBN. But in new estimates released in the 2016 Corporate Plan, the cost of the multitechnology mix network favoured by the Coalition blew out and rose to two-thirds of the cost of an FTTP-based network.

“The Coalition’s funding estimates, both for FTTP and the MTM, have fluctuated significantly. The estimated funding required for the Coalition’s NBN — using MTM — has almost doubled from $28.5bn before the 2013 election, to between $46bn and $56bn in August 2015.”

Professor Tucker said that repairing and maintaining Telstra’s ageing copper network has major financial implications, as does retraining and maintaining a workforce with the wider range of skills needed to install and maintain the multitechnology mix network. These costs are unique to the MTM.

“If in 2013 the Coalition had simply allowed NBN Co to get on with the job of rolling out its FTTP NBN rather than changing to MTM, causing long delays and increasing costs, the government may well have ended up spending the same or even less and Australians would have a much faster fibre-to-the-premises based  NBN.”