NBN speed boost another stunning validation of ditching all-fibre fantasy

The NBN plan to quintuple broadband speeds is a further validation of the Abbott government’s ditching of Kevin Rudd’s all-fibre fantasy.

Changes to the NBN’s original all-fibre fantasy have proven a sucess.

The NBN plan to quintuple broadband speeds to the vast majority of its customers at no extra cost – and progressively to almost every other customer after that – is a further stunning validation of the Abbott government’s ditching in 2013 of Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy’s original all-fibre fantasy.

Indeed, the ditch/switch – driven by Abbott’s then communications minister Malcolm Turnbull – to a mix of technologies, including all-fibre, but also, utterly crucially, fibre-to-the-node, had already been well and truly validated by Covid.

The most critical consequence of the switch was to have almost all of Australia wired by 2020. True, many, maybe even most, not wired perfectly, but wired nevertheless. Just in time for when we got locked in our homes by that frightful combination of politicians and health bureaucrats.

This reality of an all-but completed, if less-than-perfect, NBN was in dramatic contrast to what would have been if we had blundered on with all-fibre. By 2020, we would have been lucky to have had one-in-three homes connected.

Since completion of the basic network, NBNCo has been building out fibre, again crucially, off a nationally functioning network, that is delivering multibillion-dollar revenues. This functioning, since 2021, self-financing reality stands in stark real-world to the would-(not)-have-been fantasy Rudd-Conroy network.

A network whose costs, like the costs of Chairman Dan and his successor Premier Jacinta’s joint “railway-to-nowhere” as well – would have been ballooning way past $100bn. And with much less revenue coming in.

An important subsidiary validation of the switch from Rudd fantasy to Turnbull reality – shown in Tuesday’s statement – is the way NBN Co then stuck with the old Telstra-Foxtel hybrid fibre coaxial cable, originally rolled out in the 1990s for Pay-TV. Under the Rudd-Conroy all-fibre plan, the HFC cable, snaking out to three million premises, mostly in Melbourne and Sydney, would have been just thrown away.

The Turnbull Multi-Technology Mix roll-out used it where it made sense – as it took HFC cable right to the premise; and, with over two million customers today, is a core part of the NBN and all-but as good as fibre to the premise.

The other big message out of what NBNCo will be doing, is to put utterly beyond any doubt that it must – and I mean must – stay in public ownership, as our premier and indeed economically foundational 21st century national operational asset.

Sitting next to, in our national balance sheet, our No.1 national financial asset – the Future Fund.

It would be somewhere between utterly idiotic and treasonous to sell either of them off to the private sector, for no other reason than to reduce government debt. The Future Fund earns roughly double the interest cost of any debt it would pay off.

The calculation for the NBN is more complex. But I would suggest a proper, intelligent, cost-benefit analysis would show it is now clearly worth its embedded expenditure.

It’s also utter nonsense to suggest that mobile broadband would make it, far less has already made it, redundant.

Originally published as NBN speed boost another stunning validation of ditching all-fibre fantasy