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A National Broadband Network? Or Malware?

There were a few awkward moments during the Coalition’s broadband policy launch. When Tony Abbott, hardly the nation’s most gifted public speaker, started using words like “megabits” and “HFC cabling”, one could see the technical elocution education that preceded it: “Yes, Tony, people watch television on computers. No, Tony, no more 68cm CRTs.”

The ungainly back-patting from Abbott to erstwhile leadership rival, Malcolm Turnbull served to undermine Abbott’s place in this whole charade. As Alan Kohler has argued, Malcolm Turnbull has single-handedly saved the NBN. He has taken the Liberals from a party hell-bent on destroying the NBN to one willing to spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on their own broadband vision. Come September, this will likely be the new, albeit imperfect, National Broadband Network. How far we have come.

What the Coalition’s policy is:

First things first, the Coalition’s broadband policy is a complete policy document. Unlike most Coalition policies (such as “stopping the boats” or “ending the waste” as ‘detailed’ in “Our Plan: Real Solutions for All Australians”), it is no glossy brochure. No fluffy pictures of Tony or Mal in hi-viz, just words. Many, many words. This sort of documentary detail should be demanded more often from our politicians. Ahem, Scott Morrison. Basically, the Coalition’s broadband policy is to lay fibre just like Labor’s NBN, except that instead of fibre passing and connecting to every home as in Labor’s NBN, the fibre will terminate at a roadside node. From there, it will use the existing copper network to connect homes to the network. This use of the existing copper network is the policy’s most contentious aspect. According to Telstra, copper has a lifespan of around 30 years and 80% of the copper network is either close to or beyond this age.

What the Coalition’s policy is not:

The Coalition’s broadband policy is not, technically speaking, a patch on Labor’s NBN. It’s not even a pale imitation. With quoted minimum speeds of 25mbit/s up to a maximum 100mbit/s, it does not compare to the NBN’s minimum of 100mbit/s.
The optical fibre of the NBN offers far greater speed and reliability. However, where the Coalition sees “no evidence” that customers need or want the high bandwidth fibre offers, those in the technology industry envisage the unlimited potential of fibre.

Fibre is good for you

Abbott is “absolutely confident” that 25 megabits-per-second will be “more than enough” for households. In 2013, maybe. In 2023, probably not. After all, it was only 15 years ago that most households connected via ‘adequate’ 28.8kbps dial-up modems. Average speeds today are over 170 times faster than those line-clogging tech dinosaurs. Imagine what the next fifteen years might bring? If it’s anything like the last fifteen, the only technology capable of delivering the same bandwidth increases is fibre.

Optical fibre is as close to a “future-proof” technology as possible. Since fibre was first employed in undersea communications cables in the 1980s, it has invisibly revolutionised telecommunications. While copper cables have physical limits on the amount of data they can transmit, optical fibre is yet to reach its full potential. Although Turnbull argues future developments of vectoring and VDSL may deliver higher speeds over copper, these are essentially transitional technologies propping up an ageing network. While future DSL technologies could, on a good day with the sun shining and with no-one else using the line, deliver maybe 200 mbit/s, fibre could do it in a pinch and as the Google Fiber project in Kansas has demonstrated, can go even faster.

The Coalition’s broadband network will cost 75% of the Labor NBN, but will deliver maximum speeds 10% of the NBN’s realistic potential. Of course Turnbull and Abbott have argued their fibre-to-the-node network can be upgraded over time, but wouldn’t it be more prudent to do it once and to do it properly?

The vision thing

The electorate often bangs on about politicians not having a “vision” for the country, but when Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy announced a fibre-to-the-home national network, it was a bold decision that required “vision”. It was a vision that imagined Australia as the world leader in a field that, for once, wasn’t an Olympic sport. A piece of infrastructure Australians could rightly feel proud of as they rode their steam-era rail infrastructure to work or paid five times as much for a pair of jeans at the department store. Perhaps Donald Horne’s “tyranny of distance” could finally be overcome?

No. It was too much to ask for. Critics attached moronic car analogies where optical fibre became the “Rolls-Royce” of available options, rather than an inspired, forward-looking strategy. Another popular pejorative was describing the construction of world-leading infrastructure as “gold-plating”. Now Australia will have an adequate system. A mediocre country. Perhaps future politicians will heed the experiences of their predecessors before employing something stupid like “vision”.

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