The current MTM NBN is by all accounts a total mess. Every single promise that the Liberal party has made with respect to it has been broken. First the guaranteed speed being delivered to the majority of Australians was scrapped. Then the timeline blew out as the FTTN trials took far longer to accomplish than they stated they would. Finally the cost of the network, widely described as being a third of the FTTP solution, has since ballooned to well above any cost estimate that preceded it. The slim sliver of hope that all us technologically inclined Australians hang on to is that this current government goes single term and that Labor would reintroduce the FTTP NBN in all its glory. Whilst it seems that Labor is committed to their original idea the future of Australia’s Internet will bear the scars of the Liberals term in office.
Jason Clare, who’s picked up the Shadow Communications Minister position in the last Labor cabinet reshuffle before the next election, has stated that they’d ramp up the number of homes connected to fiber if they were successful at the next election. Whilst there’s no solid policy documents available yet to determine what that means Clare has clearly signalled that FTTN rollouts are on the way out. This is good news however it does mean that Australia’s Internet infrastructure won’t be the fiber heaven that it was once envisioned to be. Instead we will be left with a network that’s mostly fiber with pockets of Internet backwaters with little hope of change in the near future.
Essentially it would seem that Labor would keep current contract commitments which would mean a handful of FTTN sites would still be deployed and anyone on a HFC network would remain on them for the foreseeable future. Whilst these are currently serviceable their upgrade paths are far less clear than their fully fiber based brethren. This means that the money spent on upgrading the HFC networks, as well as any money spent on remediating copper to make FTTN work, is wasted capital that could have been invested in the superior fiber only solution. Labor isn’t to blame for this, I understand that breaking contractual commitments is something they’d like to avoid, but it shows just how much damage the Liberals MTM NBN plan has done to Australia’s technological future.
Unfortunately there’s really no fix for this, especially if you want something politically palatable.
If we’re serious about transitioning Australia away from the resources backed economy that’s powered us over the last decade investments like the FTTP NBN are what we are going to need. There’s clear relationships between Internet speeds and economic growth something which would quickly make the asking price look extremely reasonable. Doing it half-arsed with a cobbled together mix of technologies will only result in a poor experience, dampening any benefits that such a network could provide. The real solution, the one that will last us as long as our current copper network has, is to make it all fiber. Only then will we be able to accelerate our growth at the same rapid pace as the rest of the world is and only then will we see the full benefits of what a FTTP NBN can provide.
