There’s little doubt now that the Multi-Technology Mix was a viable path forward for the NBN. The tenants of faster, cheaper and sooner have all fallen by the wayside in one way or another. The speed guarantees were dropped very quickly as NBNCo (now known as just nbn™) came face to face with the reality that the copper network simply couldn’t support them. The cost of their solution has come into question numerous times and has shown to be completely incorrect. Worst still the subsequent cost blowouts are almost wholly attributed to the changes made by the MTM switch, not the original FTTP solution. Lastly with the delays that the FTTN trials have experienced along with the disruption to provisioning activities that were already under way there is no chance that we’ll have it sooner. Worse still it appears that the HFC network, the backbone upon which Turnbull built his MTM idea, isn’t up to the task of providing NBN services.
The leaked report shows that, in its current state, the Optus HFC network simply doesn’t have the capacity nor is it up to the standards required to service NBN customers. Chief among the numerous issues listed in the presentation is the fact that the Optus cable network is heavily oversubscribed and would require additional backhaul and nodes to support new customers. Among the other issues listed are pieces of equipment that are in need of replacement, the presence of ingress noise reducing user speeds and the complexity of the established HFC network’s multipathing infrastructure. All said the cost of remediating this network (or “overbuilding” it as they are saying) ranges from $150 million up to $800 million in addition to the capital already spent to acquire the network.
Some of the options presented to fix this solution are frankly comical, like the idea that nbn should engage Telstra to extend their HFC network to cover the areas currently serviced by Optus. Further options peg FTTP as the most expensive with FTTdp (fiber to the distribution point) and FTTN coming in as the cheaper alternatives. The last one is some horrendous mix of FTTdp and Telstra HFC which would just lead to confusion for consumers, what with 2 NBN offerings in the same suburb that had wildly different services and speeds available on them. Put simply Optus’ HFC network being in the state it is has no good solution other than the one that the original NBN plan had in mind.
The ubiquitous fiber approach that the original NBN sought to implement avoided all the issues that the MTM solution is now encountering for the simple fact that we can’t trust the current state of any of the networks deployed in Australia. It has been known for a long time that the copper network is aging and in dire need of replacement, unable to reliably provide the speeds that many consumers now demand. The HFC network has always been riddled with issues with nearly every metro deployment suffering from major congestion issues from the day it was implemented. Relying on both these things to deliver broadband services was doomed to fail and it’s not surprising that that’s exactly what we’ve seen ever since the MTM solution was announced.
Frankly this kind of news no longer surprises me. I had hoped that the Liberals would have just taken credit for the original idea that Labor put forward but they went one step further and trashed the whole thing. A full FTTP solution would have catapulted Australia to the forefront of the global digital economy, providing benefits far in excess of its cost. Now however we’re likely decades away from achieving that, all thanks to the short sightedness of a potential one term government. There really is little to hope for when it comes to the future of the NBN and there’s no question in my mind of who is to blame.
