I can't understand why the press are not asking the obvious...

I can't understand why the press are not asking the obvious questions about the NBN. It is clearly a disaster in the making.

1) It is said to be a commercial undertaking but will have a standard price independent of location and cost of provision. That doesn't work without a guaranteed monopoly such as Australia Post has. Otherwise the cheap to service city locations will be offered a cheaper service by a rival leaving the country locations to the NBN.

2) The cost of servicing the $43Bn investment will have to be on top of the existing cost of running the existing servers etc. There is a double count of about $11Bn if Telstra provides some of the hardware. This leaves new hardware of $32Bn to be instaled and its debt serviced.
Suppose about half the households take up the service, thats 5m customers. The WACC for regulated utilities such as telcos is set by the regulators at an appropriate rate of about 8%.
Additional cost per customer therefore must be 32,000m x 0.08 / 5m = $512/annum excluding maintenance costs or ammortisation of the debt.
Fibre has a 20 year life so ammortisation per house hold will be $320.
A minimal allowance for maintenance, admin, postage etc will bring this to $1,000/ customer per year.

3) Fixed computers wired to the wall are for dinosaurs. I Pads and ever smaller portables will make fibre to the home a waste of time. Blind Freddy can see that more people everyday are carrying their IPhones and small computers on them.

Is it too late to stop this madness?

bacci