Two-speed NBN will fail to meet its targets, committee told

NBN joint standing committee deputy chairman Josh Wilson said the “multi-technology mess” meant the NBN would fall short of its basic benchmark in delivering fast internet speeds. Picture: Lukas Coch/AAP

NBN Co’s promise to deliver fast internet speeds to 90 per cent of fixed-line premises will be achieved in only three of Australia’s eight states and territories.

In written answers to a federal parliamentary committee, NBN Co said it would meet the federal government’s benchmark speeds of 50 megabits a second in the Northern Territory (96 per cent of premises), Victoria (92 per cent) and NSW (91 per cent) by the time the network is built.

But it revealed that Western Australia (85 per cent) and the ACT (84 per cent) were languishing at the bottom of the pile.

The failure to meet the 90 per cent target in WA means an extra 50,000 premises will miss out on fast broadband in the state.

NBN Co said it would meet the target “at a ­national level” but conceded it would be unevenly distributed. Five states and territories would be lagging when the network was completed. It said it would seek to rectify speed issues once the period of coexistence — during which customers can shift from ADSL connections to the NBN — had ended.

The government’s 2016 statement of expectations did not specify each state and territory meet the minimum standard.

NBN joint standing committee deputy chairman Josh Wilson, a WA Labor MP, said the Coalition’s “multi-technology mess” meant the NBN would fall short of its basic benchmark in delivering fast internet speeds.

He said WA received just 2000 of the 440,000 faster fibre-to-the-curb connections that were added to the network over the past year. This was a missed opportunity to redress the emerging quality/speed disparities between jurisdictions.

“I have been saying for some time that WA is getting the worst-quality NBN of all the states,” he said. “That is unacceptable when you consider we face the greatest challenge in terms of scale and remoteness.

“And now we learn that WA has been short-changed when it comes to additional FTTC connections. It’s ridiculous that we received barely 0.5 per cent of the new FTTC rollout when that was an opportunity to start correcting our bottom-of-the-pile network.”

NBN Co told the committee that most of the FTTC rollout occurred in former Optus and present Telstra cable network areas.

“WA did have an Optus presence and as a result inner-city areas of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane contain a higher proportion of HFFC,” it said.

Communications Minister Mitch Fifield said by the time the NBN rollout was complete next year, 90 per cent of the fixed-line footprint would have access to speeds of 50Mbps and most of these would have enjoy much higher speeds.

“And because the Coalition’s rollout will be completed six to eight years sooner and cost $30 billion less than Labor’s plan, household broadband bills will be $500 a year lower than would have been the case under Labor,” he said.