longweekend58 wrote on Dec 25^th, 2011 at 4:54pm:


Actually, it's pretty much the opposite. New greenfield estates aside, the best broadband in Australia (and the only part that is really the equiv of most developed countries) is the areas covered by HFC cable networks. Telstra's covers about 25% of the population, while Optus' covers about 15%. Neither network has been expanded for about a decade.

Then there is the pricing. Less than 9% of Telstra exchanges have competitive ADSL2+, which means most areas must pay the exhorbitant prices of Telstra retail or wholesale ADSL2+. That means people like me, an hour from Sydney, pay almost double the price someone 20 minutes away pays for exactly the same service. The NBN is not just about speed, but also ubiquity of service and pricing.

As for whether it's "good enough".... Australia sits close to the bottom of the OECD list for both average broadband speeds and fibre penetration. We are actually outranked by many undeveloped countries, and last I looked were about 60th in the World. Average speeds are only about 8-9Mbps here. While such speeds may be adequate for many people now, what about in 10 years? A decade ago average speeds were around 128kbps (and we thought that was fast), so they have now increased by a factor of about 80. Do you expect that we won't need or expect a similar increase over the next 10 years, or do you think the demand for bandwidth will suddenly come to a grinding halt? Because the only way speeds can be increased now is:
a) Roll out fibre
b) Roll out HFC
c) Roll out FTTN

...and all of those options take a long time to design and build. FTTN is the fastest, but that would still take 5 years and be reasonably quickly obsolete. There's no point starting HFC now because it would cost as much as FTTP. So that leaves fibre. Build it once. Build it right.

Distance is the issue, and there is no DSL technology that can overcome our big distances. So if Govt don't do it who will? And (given the evidence of outrageous private sector FTTP pricing) how much will we pay for it?

The incredible short-sightedness of conservatives never ceases to amaze me, not to mention the dogmatic attachment to "free market" ideology even in the face of irrefutable evidence that theory doesn't always work in practise.