The current NBN policy is predicated upon building the major infrastructure – the network infrastructure – only once, and its lasting for decades. For this reason, the current NBN policy must be seen as being far more future-proof than the alternative policy. Optical fibre, already capable of supporting bandwidths in terabytes per second, is considered to have a lifeteime of 40 to 60 years. (A caveat is that the new satellites to be launched in 2015 to support the 3% of homes in remote areas will probably need to be replaced in 15 to 20 years. The fixed radio technology supporting 4% of premises can be replaced or upgraded much more cheaply, but should last a good 20 years without upgrades.)
If the current NBN policy is predicated upon providing international competitive advantage to Australia over several decades, the Coalition’s NBN policy can be fairly categorised as a more cost-effective catch-up across Australia of the bandwidth that most households need now, in two stages.
Firstly, within the parliamentary term ending in 2016, their plan aims to universally match the 25 Mbps “bar” now set by NBN Co’s fixed radio technology, announced two months ago (an impressive doubling of the previously planned 12 Mbps download speed, due to improvements in radio technology). In a second stage, to be completed by 2019, they aim to provide 50 Mbps minimum access speed to all FTTN and FTTH premises. This is an excellent aim for a cost-effective short-term (six year) plan.
However, in many cases, the proposed new FTTN technology intended for use in 71% of premises will not reach this speed in areas of low copper reticulation (British Telecom’s solution in the UK requires the use of two pairs of copper per house connected, which is not universally available here), or in areas of ageing or particularly water-prone copper cables (a frequent situation).
The Coalition’s solution is to provide FTTH in these exceptional cases. Without access to their business plan, one cannot see if they have factored in enough cases to affect their budget.
Four quick points in conclusion. Firstly, the Coalition has minimised the likelihood of any rural backlash by basically leaving the current NBN plan intact in rural areas. Secondly, it has not (at the time of writing) released its estimate of the cost of paying Telstra to maintain in working condition the copper network that will link its new FTTN cabinets to customer premises. There is reason to believe that the Coalition will have significantly underestimated this.
Thirdly, the Coalition has behaved extraordinarily like the Gillard government did in 2010 in building an investment case for the NBN that fails to factor in the real benefits to the nation’s GDP, such as to the digital economy – let alone attempting to “capitalise” the benefits of social inclusion through facilitating universal broadband access.
Instead, the Coalition’s proposal reads like an engineering investment case alone – an impression reinforced by Mr Abbott’s statement today that his NBN, unlike the current one, will provide “a real commercial return”. Given all the cherry-picking that their NBN policy will allow to private developers, free at last to directly compete with the NBN’s access infrastructure wherever they can make a profit, there is good reason to think that the Coalition’s NBN will, as a result, inevitably operate at a loss.
Lastly, the Coalition makes much ado about saving taxpayers’ money through reducing the scope and scale of the NBN. In fact, the only taxpayers’ money saved would seem to lie in lower interest payments made by Treasury in the period before the NBN breaks even – in a period of historically low interest rates. These savings need to be offset by the loss to the economy of all the construction jobs associated with FTTH – the most labour-intensive part of the current rollout.
Peter Gerrand is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in telecommunications at the University of Melbourne. This article first appeared on 
The Conversation.
