For about a decade Telstra (perhaps in concert with Optus) dragged their feet on implementing world class broadband for Aust (as in ...why invest when the cash is rollin in anyway)
Remember the squabbles the Libs had with Telstra (remember Sol Trujillo) ??
Rudd eventually gave up waiting for Telstra, opting for the NBN model (fibre to the premises (FTTP))
The Libs opposed this strongly as we all know (was it a case of the "NO to everything" strategy ??)
In any case the Libs argued we did not need the speeds of FTTP instead suggesting less-expensive fibre-to-the-node (FTTN)
And where are we now ? Oh it's heading to be one expensive mess of technologies
The high price to score a few political points
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The Abbott Coalition government came to power two years ago this week with a promise to change Labor’s fibre to the premises (FTTP) National Broadband Network (
NBN) to one using less-expensive fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) technologies, spruiking its network with the
three-word slogan: “Fast. Affordable. Sooner.”
But with the release in August of the 2016 NBN
corporate plan and in the light of overseas developments, it is clear that the Coalition’s broadband network will not provide adequate bandwidth, will be no more affordable than Labor’s FTTP network and will take almost as long to roll out.
With the benefits of two years' hindsight since 2013, let’s look at the Coalition’s performance against each of the three assertions in their 2013 slogan.
Affordable
The graph (below) shows funding estimates for the NBN from December 2010 to August 2015. Labor’s funding estimates for its FTTP NBN rose from A$40.9 billion in December 2010 to A$44.9 billion in September 2013, an increase of 10%. By comparison, the Coalition’s funding estimates, both for FTTP and the so-called multi-technology mix (MTM), have fluctuated wildly.
http://theconversation.com/the-nbn-why-its-slow-expensive-and-obsolete-47191
