To Build or Not to Build? The NBN Debate in Australia

The National Broadband Network (NBN) has been a hot topic of debate for many years now. Under the Labor Government, the gears are finally working and implementation has been underway slowly. So slowly that now it is already nearly 9 months behind schedule. The reason for this delay was according to the responsible party a lengthy negotiation period with Telstra to use their current infrastructure to lay the fibre optics network. Nonetheless, it seems that Kiama, a small town120km south of Sydney, finally tastes the first fruit from this ambitious project. The first trial of this network was very promising as the Internet connection speed is proved to be much higher than the current ADSL network that most Australians are using.

There is no doubt that there is a cost blow out here. This is just kind of typical with most Australian infrastructure projects even after considering the inflation costs. It is at this point that the Liberal Coalition comes out with a “better solution” to deal with the situation. According to the Coalition plan, instead of wiring the whole network with fibre optics to 93% of households in Australia, they would create fibre optics nodes and then through these nodes deliver higher speed connection to households using existing copper wires. With this change, they could save up to $10 billion and also have the infrastructure completed much earlier than the Labor Government’s current plan.

This kind of proposal was jarring indeed. First of all, Australia is already quite behind from other parts of the world in terms of Internet connection speed and Internet services. I have personally tried the fibre optics network when I visited my parents in Hong Kong earlier this year. The experience was exceptionally smooth, fast and stable. This is what fibre optics could offer and this is exactly what Australia needs if we want to stay relevant in this more and more tech savvy business world. The Coalition’s proposal of using nodes, while still feasible would still be determined by how much data copper wires could transmit and at the same time how many people are connecting to the nodes using the Internet at the same time. The end result could still be dropping out and much slower Internet connection. The situation would be like they built a great bullet train network to get people home quickly from the CBD but there is a catch – the bullet trains only serves suburbs within 10km from the CBD and people who want to go further will need to change over to lower capacity buses that comes at irregular intervals depending on the road traffic. There is still a timetable but buses may not come on time because the traffic is busy. And of course nobody would be responsible for this slow down because one can never predict traffic situation precisely. In other words, the whole “bullet train bringing people home quicker” is just an empty promise with nobody responsible for the end results because “traffic is never predictable”.

I personally do not know how much does the Coalition care about the future of Australia. They claimed to be the future of Australia but all I could see is they are living in the past. If Australia wants to stay competitive a much-needed improvement in Internet connection is required. The world will not wait around for Australia to one day wake up and found out they are at the ass of the world – both geographically and technologically. The Coalition’s “vision” for me is a very short term, inconsiderate and extremely selfish. Certainly Tony Abbott wants to be the Prime Minister direly. There is no doubt about that. But putting Australia’s future on the line while painting a fake picture that he does not need to be responsible for in the future to achieve this goal for me shows how selfish he is even as a politician. This is what I feel most disgusted about. Not the lack of vision and understanding in this plan, but the guts he has to propose this at the expense of Australia’s future to gamble for his Prime Ministership.

The Coalition plan might fix things in a short-term manner – lower cost and earlier completion, but then in the long run how could Australia compete when the Internet requires greater and great amount of data transfer within a shorter period of time just to operate normally? The Internet will only be more data demanding and developers would not be waiting for Australia to be able to do so to further enhance their web pages, analytical tools and transfer of information. What is left for Australia when those good old copper wires could no longer handle such a data-demanding monster called the Internet? Probably Tony Abbott does not care because probably by that time he might have had his taste of Prime Ministership and have this job as an item on his CV. At the end of the day, it would be again the general Australians who suffered – and that includes both the private and business sectors.

So the question now is – should we continue to wait for the slow pace implementation of the NBN or should we buy the Coalition’s new proposal for short-term and quick fix? For me I would still opt for the first choice knowing the pain of Labor’s usual snail pace implementation history for most projects. As a responsible Australian I do care about Australia’s future and this is what I believe in.