MICHELLE ROWLAND MP
SHADOW MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS
MEMBER FOR GREENWAY

NBN SPEED ANNOUNCEMENT CONFIRMS THE LIBERALS DON’T HAVE A CLUE ABOUT BROADBAND

  
Do you remember when Paul Fletcher championed a report in Parliament claiming only 2 per cent of Australians would need speeds of 50 megabits per second or more by 2026?
 
Yes, we remember.
 
NBNCo has today announced it is enabling 1 gigabit speeds (1,000 Mbps), however the ability of Australians to access that speed depends on what technology they have:
 

Source: IT News — NBNCo limits gigabit services to only 7 per cent of the footprint, 29 May 2020
Source: SMH — NBN admits 3 in 4 copper customers won’t get 100 mbps speeds, 17 January 2018

Only Fibre to the Premises has the capacity to support 1 gigabit speeds from the outset.
 
Despite the spin unloaded today, HFC will require significant upfront and ongoing expenditure by taxpayers to enable the capacity constrained network to offer ‘best effort’ 1 gigabit speeds to more users.
 
This is why Bill Morrow, Stephen Rue and the NBNCo Board recommended to Government that HFC be canned – because it was more expensive than fibre over the long run.
 
This announcement is not only a vindication of the economics of the original fibre model, but raises a series of questions about the confused priorities of Government:

• Why are the Liberals now prioritising 1,000 megabit speeds on HFC when some copper users can’t even achieve 25 megabits per second? 
• Why is so much taxpayer money being ploughed into HFC when $200 million was quietly cut from the regional fixed-wireless network?

 
Presumably the answer is NBNCo management and its Board have concluded Australians do want faster speeds and this is good for the NBN business case.

Then why didn’t we just deploy fibre to begin with?
 
Because the Liberals don’t have a clue.
 
It is regional Australians and taxpayers who have borne the brunt of this incompetence.

FRIDAY, 29 MAY 2020