Two years on, most of Turnbull's August 2013 election promises are broken. His "multi-technology mix" NBN, which uses a mix of technologies including old Telstra copper cables and Telstra and Optus hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) cables (the kind used for Foxtel connections), faces many of the problems that dogged Labor, and is arguably more politicised than it was then, with one expert describing the NBN company's relationship with media as "adversarial".
The 25Mbps by 2016 is not going to happen, and the overall completion date is now 2020 (originally 2019). Peak funding costs have blown out three times: from $29.5 billion before the election; to $41 billion following the Coalition government-commissioned Strategic Review; to a range of $46 billion to $56 billion in August this year.
Now, thanks to recent media leaks revealing the costs to upgrade the copper and HFC networks, many are beginning to question whether Turnbull's revamped NBN was the cheaper, quicker option.
First came Fairfax Media's leak showing parts of the Optus HFC network, which NBN paid $800 million for, were "not fit for purpose". (NBN originally paid Optus to decommission the network in 2011 under Labor, but Turnbull opted to upgrade it and use it as part of the MTM.)
The leaked document showed the HFC network would require up to $375 million to fix, and would cause NBN to miss its 2017 and 2018 connection targets.
A week later came a document in The Australian showing a 10-fold blowout in remediation costs for Telstra's copper nodes, totalling $641 million.
To many industry analysts, none of this was surprising.
"Here in Australia [HFC is] quite old and hasn't had as much maintenance done on it as perhaps some countries overseas," explains Mike Quigley, who was chief executive of NBN under Labor.
"That's the reason we didn't use it [under the original design]."
The NBN company says it accounted for scenarios like these in its latest corporate plan: that's what the broad cost estimate range is for. But according to the warnings, these were not contingencies so much as inevitabilities.
Telecommunications analyst Paul Budde believes Turnbull ignored good advice on the state of the networks for political reasons, and "only surrounded himself with friends who all had the same sort of view on the NBN".
Budde is concerned that the NBN's mix of "second-rate" technologies, which lag significantly in speeds compared to fibre-to-the-premise, will leave the NBN vulnerable to competition from private players like Telstra, which is investing heavily in its fixed-wireless network.
"If the NBN is no longer super duper, the next thing obviously is others [telco providers] are going to step in [and offer quality of service that the NBN is not delivering]," Budde says. "That will massively undermine the core business model [of the NBN], no doubt about it."
The operational costs of the mixed technologies are also higher thanks to a more complex IT network, plus electricity to power copper nodes and copper maintenance costs. And some telco providers are not happy with the complexity of managing different technologies on the network.
"Instead of spending our time innovating for customers we're spending it on interfaces with NBN," says one senior telco executive.
"It's turning out to be a bit of a shoddy, delayed, 'sticky tape and rubber band and gaffer tape' solution. We've got a more complicated process of lesser quality with difficult upgrade paths and added cost on telcos, which at the end of the day translates to added costs for consumers."
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The 25Mbps by 2016 is not going to happen, and the overall completion date is now 2020 (originally 2019). Peak funding costs have blown out three times: from $29.5 billion before the election; to $41 billion following the Coalition government-commissioned Strategic Review; to a range of $46 billion to $56 billion in August this year.
Now, thanks to recent media leaks revealing the costs to upgrade the copper and HFC networks, many are beginning to question whether Turnbull's revamped NBN was the cheaper, quicker option.
First came Fairfax Media's leak showing parts of the Optus HFC network, which NBN paid $800 million for, were "not fit for purpose". (NBN originally paid Optus to decommission the network in 2011 under Labor, but Turnbull opted to upgrade it and use it as part of the MTM.)
The leaked document showed the HFC network would require up to $375 million to fix, and would cause NBN to miss its 2017 and 2018 connection targets.
A week later came a document in The Australian showing a 10-fold blowout in remediation costs for Telstra's copper nodes, totalling $641 million.
To many industry analysts, none of this was surprising.
"Here in Australia [HFC is] quite old and hasn't had as much maintenance done on it as perhaps some countries overseas," explains Mike Quigley, who was chief executive of NBN under Labor.
"That's the reason we didn't use it [under the original design]."
The NBN company says it accounted for scenarios like these in its latest corporate plan: that's what the broad cost estimate range is for. But according to the warnings, these were not contingencies so much as inevitabilities.
Telecommunications analyst Paul Budde believes Turnbull ignored good advice on the state of the networks for political reasons, and "only surrounded himself with friends who all had the same sort of view on the NBN".
Budde is concerned that the NBN's mix of "second-rate" technologies, which lag significantly in speeds compared to fibre-to-the-premise, will leave the NBN vulnerable to competition from private players like Telstra, which is investing heavily in its fixed-wireless network.
"If the NBN is no longer super duper, the next thing obviously is others [telco providers] are going to step in [and offer quality of service that the NBN is not delivering]," Budde says. "That will massively undermine the core business model [of the NBN], no doubt about it."
The operational costs of the mixed technologies are also higher thanks to a more complex IT network, plus electricity to power copper nodes and copper maintenance costs. And some telco providers are not happy with the complexity of managing different technologies on the network.
"Instead of spending our time innovating for customers we're spending it on interfaces with NBN," says one senior telco executive.
"It's turning out to be a bit of a shoddy, delayed, 'sticky tape and rubber band and gaffer tape' solution. We've got a more complicated process of lesser quality with difficult upgrade paths and added cost on telcos, which at the end of the day translates to added costs for consumers."
Read more:
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