Terry McCrann: How the NBN has delivered just in time
The NBN has delivered, and it has done so in what can only be described as the ultimate — the hit-the-ground running immediate — stress test, rites Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann
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The National Broadband Network found itself in exactly the right place at the right time – quite literally, (almost) all of Australia.
Running into the virus and even more particularly the federal and state-government mandated ‘Work From Home’ (WFH) Lockdown, the NBN was almost totally built.
By the end of the national lockdown – and just in time for Victoria’s self-imposed solitary Lockdowns 2.0 and 3.0 – it was fully built, give or take the few odd exceptions.
Just when we – that’s ‘we’ as in almost all 25 million of us – needed it, it was there; it worked; and it worked exceptionally well.
Indeed, apart from the ‘Gigabyte Geeks’ and those demanding 100 per cent perfection all the time and everywhere and demanding it yesterday, the NBN has delivered big time.
It has done so in what can only be described as the ultimate – the hit-the-ground running immediate – stress test. And a stress test applied pervasively across an entire continent, the sixth biggest and most sparsely populated national land area in the world.
There’s been plenty of opportunity – and even more bandwidth – to complain about the NBN. But if complaints haven’t quite soared to a deafening silence, they’ve been far less evident this year
The NBN says ‘right first time’ installations rose to 93 per cent in 2019-20; meeting agreed installation times held at 96 per cent; and, most critically of all – through the stress test – network congestion fell to “approximately 7 minutes per week in June”.
That last number is an extraordinary endorsement of the NBN working and working nationally under extraordinary stress.
Compare and contrast with the truly disastrous situation we would have found ourselves in if we had persisted with trying to build the Kevin Rudd-Steve Conroy all-fibre Rolls-Royce version.
Apart from the financial disaster that we would be facing – but, then true, what’s another multi-billion dollar Canberra-created financial disaster; both Coalition and Labor governments wear them as a badge of dishonour: did anyone mention the $80bn, heading for $100bn-plus, submarine insanity?
It’s almost as if P rime M inisterMalcolm Turnbull thought that he could throw away the tens of billions of dollars that Communications Minister Turnbull had saved by ditching the Rudd-Conroy NBN insanity.
Further, we would have gone into the WFH stress-test with not only an NBN half-built at best and more likely more like one-third built, but with horrendous complicating intersections with the old Telstra (and Optus) networks. It would have been utter chaos with a capital-K.
Yes, Rudd keeps tweeting claims that his NBN would have been completed. Yes, sure, prime minister; and bacon flies straight into (most) every fridge.
He desperately hopes he can persuade those not paying attention that just because you announce a completion date, 10 years ahead, you’ve already got there. Despite the fact that when he lost office in 2013 his NBN was hitting perhaps one-tenth of its targets after three years.
In the Rudd fantasies, Wayne Swan really did deliver those four budget surpluses. Just asking; is he in the same basement as Joe Biden?