General News
17 January, 2025
The government's NBN upgrade a long time coming
For long-suffered customers plagued by sluggish internet speeds, Tuesday's announcement of a $3 billion boost to finish the national broadband network will come as welcome news.
For long-suffered customers plagued by sluggish internet speeds, Tuesday's announcement of a $3 billion boost to finish the national broadband network will come as welcome news.
Originally devised nearly two decades ago, the long-promised pledge of a national, high-speed network available to all Australians has been more of a patchwork of services ranging from excellent to, at times, miserable.
The latest pledge promises to do away with the last mile of ageing copper wire once and for good, delivering fibre-optic cable directly to the business or premises, potentially boosting the internet speed by a factor of up to 18 times.
But for a high-speed network the rollout threatens to be painfully slow. The announcement, which was previously budgeted but now revealed, is unlikely to be completed until 2030, based on the government's own estimates. In other words it will be well beyond the term of the next parliament before those upgrades are complete, and like any major government infrastructure project, there's always scope for the unexpected blowouts to the schedule.
Access to high-speed Internet is now a necessary utility that should be available to all. It is in the same class as a reliable electricity supply, access to fresh water at the tap, sewerage services and affordable telecommunications.
This is especially the case in regional Australia where the Internet has the potential to be a great leveller. This remarkable technology, which underwent the mother of all stress tests during the pandemic, can do much to address rural and regional disadvantage.
It offers employment opportunities by allowing people to work from home or adopt hybrid working arrangements, increases access to medical services through the provision of telehealth, plays a vital role in education and allows regional businesses to be more competitive in a greatly expanded market.
An obvious question, and one the government has not rushed to address, is that despite its trenchant criticism of the "copper from the node" NBN model rolled out by the Coalition during the Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison era it has not made upgrading the network to optic fibre from the node a priority until now.
Many frustrated by the underperformance of their NBN connection have turned to either Elon Musk's premium-priced but high-performance Starlink or the roll-out of 5G as substitutes.
Neither of these options was on the table when the Rudd government first proposed the NBN.
There is a real risk that even after the additional funds have been spent and the work has been done those currently using these services will not switch back to the NBN.
If that happens then the expenditure, which would bring the total cost of the NBN to the taxpayer to more than $35 billion, could be a case of sending good money after bad.
That's because current estimates put the market value of NBN Co - which registered a multi-billion loss last year - at about $20 billion (even if a buyer could be found).
There are obvious national sovereignty issues relying on an overseas service controlled by an erratic, increasingly politically extreme owner like Elon Musk for something as important to the lives of Australians as the internet. Moving to improve the domestic alternative therefore makes sense, even if this upgrade has been a long time coming.
Will another $3 billion fix the problems and finally convince a sceptical customer base to switch back to the national network? Only time will tell.