NBN: Abbott / Turnbull Plan a Broadband Backwater

The Coalition’s NBN is proving expensive

Rod Tucker
Laureate Emeritus Professor at University of Melbourne

Under the previous Labor government, NBN Co negotiated a deal with Telstra to provide access to Telstra’s ducts and pits, enabling fibre to be laid with fewer trenches needing to be dug. The cost to NBN Co of this access was A$11 billion, and added a hefty overhead to the total cost of the NBN.

Even if we make the optimistic assumption that NBN Co will not have to pay any more than this $11 billion to access and maintain Telstra’s copper wires inside those ducts, the Coalition’s (predominantly FTTN) NBN will suffer the same $11 billion overhead. Consequently, the factor of five difference between the cost of FTTP and FTTN given in the Analysys Mason report drops to something around two or three. By world standards, the Coalition’s NBN is turning out to be very expensive.

What has Australia lost in the transition from Labor’s FTTP NBN to the Coalition’s multi-technology mix, with a large proportion of FTTP? In my view, a big danger is that future upgrades from FTTN to FTTP will be slow and that Australia will continue to lag behind the rest of the developed world in terms of broadband access.

With such a huge investment sunk in the Coalition’s multi-technology mix NBN, there is going to be very little appetite in government to fund future expensive upgrades to FTTP. If the government sells the NBN to a commercial monopoly operator, there could be even less incentive for upgrades to FTTP. There is a real danger that Australia will remain trapped in a broadband backwater.

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