It’s no secret that I’m loudly, violently opposed to the Liberal’s Multi-Technology Mix NBN solution and I’ve made it my business to ensure that the wider Australian public is aware of frightfully bad it will be. The reasons as to why the Liberal’s solution is so bad are many however they can almost all be traced back to them wanting to cast anything that Labor created in a poor light and that their ideas are far better. Those of us in the know have remained unconvinced however, tearing into every talking point and line of rhetoric to expose the Liberal’s NBN for the farce it is. Now, as the Liberals attempt to rollout their inferior solution, they are no longer able to hide behind bullshit reports as the real world numbers paint an awfully bad picture for their supposedly better NBN.
The slogan of the MTM NBN being “Fast Affordable. Sooner.” has become an easy target as the months have rolled on since the Liberal Party announced their strategy. Whilst the first point can always be debated (since 25Mbps should be “more than enough” according to Abbott) the second two can be directly tied to real world metrics that we’re now privy to. You see with the release of the MTM NBN strategy all works that were planned, but not yet executed, were put on hold whilst a couple FTTN trial sites were scheduled to be established. The thinking was that FTTN could be deployed much faster than a FTTP solution and, so the slogan went, much cheaper too. Well here we are a year and a half later and it’s not looking good for the Liberals and unfortunately, by extension, us Australians.
It hasn’t been much of secret that the FTTN trials that NBNCo have been conducting haven’t exactly been stellar with them experiencing significant delays in getting them set up. Considering that the Liberals gave themselves a 2016 deadline for giving everyone 25Mbps+ speeds these delays didn’t bode well for getting the solution out before the deadline. Those delays appear to have continued with the trial now having just 53 customers connected to the original Umima trial and not a single one connected to the Epping trial. This is after they gave a timeline of “within a month” in October last year. Suffice to say the idea that FTTN could be made available to the wide public by the end of 2016 is starting to look really shakey and so is the 2019 timeframe for their completion of the NBN.
Worst still the idea that the MTM NBN would be significantly cheaper than the full FTTP NBN is yet again failing to stand up to scrutiny. Additional cost analysis conducted by NBNCo, which includes opex costs that were previously excluded under previous costing models, has seen the cost per premises estimate for brownfields (deployed to existing houses) rise to $4316. That’s a substantial increase however it’s a more accurate representation of how much it actually costs to get a single house deployed. Taking that into account the total cost for deploying the FTTP NBN comes out to about $47 billion, very close to the original budget that Labor had allocated for it. Whilst it was obvious that the Liberal’s cost-benefit analysis was a crock of shit from the beginning this just adds further proves the point and casts more doubt over the MTM NBN being significantly cheaper.
I’m honestly not surprised by this anymore as its clear that the Liberals really had no intent of adhering to their rhetoric and were simply trashing the FTTP NBN because it was Labor’s idea. It’s an incredibly short sighted way of looking at it, honestly, as they would have won far more favour with a lot of people if they had just continued with the FTTP NBN as it was. Instead they’re going to waste years and multiple billions of dollars on a system that won’t deliver on its promises and we’ll be left to deal with the mess. All we can really hope for at this point is that we make political history and cement the Liberal’s reign under the OneTermTony banner.
