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Nationwide FTTP coverage was a worthy, if expensive, ambition; shame about Malcolm Turnbull’s mess.
Australia’s former communications minister Stephen Conroy, the man who kicked-off the endless political debate/infrastructure project that is the national broadband network (NBN), unexpectedly resigned this week, giving pundits like myself the perfect excuse to compare his vision to today’s reality.
Let’s start with the similarities.
First and foremost, it’s still called NBN, which is important because you don’t want to confuse people by changing the name midway through. Secondly, its stated aim remains providing nationwide wholesale broadband services.
And that’s about it.
NBN’s choice of broadband tech, its estimated cost, the timeframe, senior personnel, etc. have all changed over the years.
What started off as an ambitious plan to turn Australia into a broadband trailblazer that could compete with regional rivals like Singapore and Shanghai, has descended into a piecemeal project beset by technical issues that will deliver ultrafast speeds to a small proportion of the country, while the majority will get fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) with the promise of a speed boost further down the line, courtesy of G.fast – depending how long their copper line is, of course.
The private sector could have done that on its own. Heck, I could’ve done something as half-baked as that. OK, maybe not, but you see where I’m coming from.
Under Conroy’s original plan, 93% of households would get access to fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) services, with the rest covered by satellite and fixed-wireless networks.
That’s exactly the kind of moonshot that necessitates state intervention, but the billions of dollars of required investment, and the planned decommissioning of incumbent Telstra’s legacy copper network at the expense of the government, made NBN and Conroy easy targets for political opponents, like shadow communications minister and current prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, for instance.
Ahead of the 2013 general election, Turnbull promised to spend less on the NBN by scaling back the FTTP rollout and relying primarily on FTTC instead, buying copper access networks off Telstra to use for the final drop.
Conroy and his Labor colleagues subsequently lost the vote to the Liberal-National coalition led by Tony Abbott. As the new communications minister, Turnbull got his way, introducing the now infamous multi-technology mix (MTM), which has also been called ‘Malcolm Turnbull’s Mess’.
According to NBN’s latest corporate plan, published in August, around 2 million-2.5 million premises will get FTTP coverage, while 2.5 million-3.2 million will be covered by hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) networks.
Those are realistically the only two technologies in the MTM that can deliver Gigabit broadband. The majority will get one of either fibre-to-the-cabinet/basement/distribution point, while the rest will be covered by fixed-wireless or satellite infrastructure.
As a result, by 2020, only 40% of Australians covered by the NBN, which by then will have cost approximately A$48.6 billion (€32.5 billion), will be able to receive up to 1-Gbps broadband.
Meanwhile, 45% will get speeds of up to 500 Mbps; 68% will get up to 100 Mbps; 86% will get up to 50 Mbps broadband, and 100% will get access to at least 25 Mbps. Better than nothing, but not exactly earth-shattering given the costs involved and the scope of Conroy’s original vision.
Indeed, the MTM was supposed to save money, but back when Conroy was dreaming up FTTP-for-all, it was widely known that sections of Telstra’s copper networks were not exactly in great condition.
That issue was played down by a Turnbull-commissioned report justifying the switch from an FTTP-led to an MTM-led strategy. However, documents leaked in late 2015 estimated that NBN would have to pay A$641 million to repair crumbling sections of copper network, 10 times the amount estimated when Turnbull pitched his MTM idea.
There is also the small matter of the A$19.1 billion of debt funding that NBN needs to secure in order to complete the rollout.
The government is contributing A$29.5 billion of public funds for the NBN, and that sum will have been spent by the end of fiscal 2017, which ends on 30 June next year. With the network expected to be completed in 2020 at a cost of A$48.6 billion, it is up to NBN to fund the remainder.
According to NBN’s latest corporate plan, the company is still reviewing its options with regard to private finance.
Now, had NBN stuck with Conroy’s FTTP-led strategy, there is every chance that the project would have run into difficulties of another kind, potentially blowing the budget and missing deadlines. As we know, physically digging the fibre is the easy part; gaining planning permission and getting access to the bit of ground you want to bury it in, that’s the hard part.
And it’s not like every other country is necessarily doing a better job than Australia when it comes to rolling out next-generation networks. Many’s the time that the U.K. and the issues it faces in trying to extend ultrafast broadband coverage have been the subject of a Friday Review, for example.
What we do know is that demand for network capacity will continue to grow, driven by the consumption of ultra-high-definition (UHD) content, and bandwidth-intensive applications like gaming. What we don’t know is how long Australia’s patchwork NBN will be fit for that purpose.
Conroy, for his part, remains proud of his baby.
"There is nothing more fulfilling and no greater privilege than to be in government and conceive, create and implement a strategy to deliver the economic and social opportunities that technology brings, and reach all Australians wherever they live and whatever their backgrounds," he said in a speech that was published online. "The national broadband network will remain my greatest contribution."
