NBN: Australia’s Conservative Government Disaster

NBN: Australia’s Broken Promise

Superfast Broadband was promised more than a decade ago and the NBN was hatched.

NBN promised speeds of 100Mbps with no buffering. Labor’s plan was to provide FTTP to almost 95% of Australians. It would cover towns with centres of as little as 3,000 residents. The remainder would be serviced via wireless and satellite.

The Coalition promised all the speed a household could possibly want, for less money. They said it would take less time to roll out and would be a better solution.

Industry insiders warned that using a mix of old copper and coaxial cable would be a disaster. The FTTN (fibre to the node) solution brought broadband to within 200m of homes, and would then connect to existing copper wires.

The botched rollout has been a disaster by any measure. The costs have blown out as predicted, and some users report speeds lower than their ADSL service.

As the old network is gradually shut down, users have no choice but to take up a new NBN plan.

With much of the network yet to be finished, slower speeds result in some streaming services being unwatchable. Network outages, low speeds, and high-cost plans, have resulted in the Communications Ombudsman’s office being flooded with complaints.

Part of the old cable TV network was purchased but later abandoned as unserviceable.

NBNCo saw part of the solution as bringing fibre closer to customers by using a Fibre to Kerb system, and while that is better than to a node 200m away, is still old hat.

The Liberal Party NBN disaster has huge ramifications for users, both business and residential users. The “Netlfix” effect sees evening speeds slow even further with buffering making ultra-high definition viewing impossible.

In short, the coalition solution saw Australia drop to near 3^rd world standards. In fact, many 3^rd world countries have vastly superior speeds.

Australia has slipped to 50^th fastest, taking 41.44 minutes to download a 5gb movie. New Zealand is twice as fast, taking a little over 20 minutes. The fastest is Taiwan, which will get the same movie in a little over 8 minutes on average.

The solution is to abandon the mixed technology, and rollout FTTP (fibre to the premises) instead, as originally planned.

NBNCo refused to comment.