I'm sorry but just because the LNP isn't on board with the Monolithic NBN project while still committing billions to infrastructure doesn't equate to "They see no value in country wide internet".
Can we not just slander because they don't agree with you?
It's not that they are not on board - it's that they are spending just as much on a version that is objectively worse in almost every way...
They have said that there's no value in homes having faster than 25Mbps, but are still putting in the same amount ($29bn Government equity investment vs $30bn before) of money to deliver that as what the fibre network that would have been able to provide 1Gbps to 93% of the population would have cost (pricing permitting, of course. But that would have dropped fast as demand went up and 1Gb/s would have been as affordable as the 100Mb/s plans available today on the NBN are).
And decent options for small business are nowhere to be found. Have you tried getting decent internet outside a CBD? We would kill for the NBN - other providers wanted between $2000 and $4000 a month for 20/20Mbps fibre, and this is in the inner suburbs of a capital city!
I don't want to get too political here but the previous government massively understated the cost of FTTP broadband. The money saved is much more substantial than $1bn. Whether it's a more effective long term investment is another question altogether.
Also, prices were not scheduled to drop for the broadband service. The Labor governments $30bn costing was predicated on NBN users paying more than they currently pay for ADSL services, and for those charges to increase annually.
Furthermore, you're calling it a saving of money in one sentence and then imply that it's in investment right in the next. So what is it, a pure expenditure or an investment?
And in fact, with the NBN plan I'd likely switch to were it available in my area I would pay $10 less than my current connection, have 4 times the download speed, 40 times the upload speed and unlimited data. Or I'd stay with the same provider and pay $5 more and the same as above but not unlimited data. Either of the two are with a phone line included.
So I guess if that's what you meant by paying more than with ADSL, then that's one way of looking at it. Another way is this (mind you, with 40 Mbps upload vs. a maximum 2 with ADSL): http://i.imgur.com/VKovuSO.png
Which blows this:
> The Labor governments $30bn costing was predicated on NBN users paying more than they currently pay for ADSL services, and for those charges to increase annually.
Pretty much right of the water, doesn't it? In fact, I'm curious. Where did you hear it and believe it to such an extent you were willing to parrot it without any further fact checking?
That's debatable - all the actual figures from the real construction that was actually happening were within the estimates provided, and they had factored in efficiency savings that were being made along the way (as has been shown to happen in other rollouts internationally).
It wasn't 'massively understated' until Malcolm Turnbull's theoretical 'Strategic Review' that estimated that the cost was going to suddenly double because of [redacted] (the alleged reasons that the previous downward trend suddenly stops and then jumps up is blacked out in the report), as well as things like inflating the peak funding because they counted the full cost but stopped counting future revenue after something like 2022 (adding about $12bn to the peak funding), and ignore like $6bn of savings from design changes that had already been signed off.
It was all pretty dodgy, but still with all the fudging only came to $56bn (instead of the old $44bn - the $14bn additional to the Government spend was to be private equity).
The second paragraph of your post is a misconception. They required a $90 per month ARPU - when you factor in business use (many who would be paying in the region of $400 - $2000 because of higher traffic classes, lower contended CVC, business SLAs, etc), home users would only need to average about $60-70 a month (that's more than I pay for ADSL that doesn't hit 4Mb/s), and that's an average which is skewed by the power users (as per the Pareto principle).
So the average household would only be paying $30 to $60 a month, which is more than competitive with ADSL when you factor in Telstra line rental. And this is across all services, not necessarily just internet, so add in phone and pay TV, which people already pay $100pm for, and it's easily conceivable that prices would have dropped.
Even now, if I were in an NBN area I could have 100Mb/s internet and VoIP for just $10 more than I pay for my slow ADSL2+ with phone (I'm on the $79p/m iiNet bundle)
Its pretty much as if the political parties and their supports dont even read each others policies, they just take the opposite position because thats the easy route.
My personal opinion is that Australia needs to let the private market run the country, rather than the government who regardless of who is in power seems only to focus on job creation (in the form of mineral extraction). If the government wants to do something it should be limited to tax reductions / removal for particular industries while they get going. Unfortunatly this would probably only work if Australia could also be shifted around 10+ hours closer to America (the continent), until then it'll be driven by the needs of Asia, which is simply energy.
Edit: I wonder how unpopular this comment will turn out to be...
I agree. The only thing I think is that the lead-ins as well as the fibres running in the streets (but not even really those in the road, for the most part), the passive infrastructure components only should be in public ownership. Think water or electricity. except it'll be private further than about a few hundred metres away from the average premises.
But the coalition privatised Telstra in 1997 without any structural separation whatsoever. That was at a time where Telstra was overbuilding its competitor's HFC network to 85% instead of the 20% previously expected by Keating-era Labor.
And Telstra was pretty much the only telco in the world that was privatised and allowed to keep both its HFC and copper networks. In Germany, the EU stepped in and forced a sell-off of Deutsche Telekom's HFC operations.
But in Australia, the coalition's obsession with privatisation to make the "surplus" look as big as possible has lead to an absolute fiasco. One where seven years later the copper network was described as "five minutes to midnight" and now ten years after that in turn, we're paying money to rent it back.
Absolute insanity - what the hell kind of government would buy or rent a copper network and invest dozens of billions into it that its current owner said was five minutes to midnight ten years ago.
I agree with the private market aspect - except for aspects of the passive infrastructure. But the government here created a shit-heap of a problem that only the government has the ability to fix.
But now they're just going to make it all worse - thanks, once again, primarily because of the coalition. But Labor's not blameless either, by a long stretch.
Oh, what's this? I think it was the sound of Tony Abbott on Jon Faine's program back in February last year lambasting Labor for treating the NBN like an infrastructure project instead of a broadband project.
Between this and ensuring that the maximum guarantee they'll have on upload speeds will be all of 1 Mbps I can assure you that the coalition's idea of an NBN is much more geared towards a video delivery mechanism for FOXTEL than anything else.
Apparently Microsoft upped their storage plans to 1 TB for a pretty cheap price, but forget about using even a fraction of that capacity here in Australia. What matters is that Murdoch gets a free extension of his HFC network and FOXTEL can use the spectrum on that liberally for free forever. And then they'll just call all the lines, regardless of technology, "Fixed line" (oh waitaminute, they already have) and just tread it all the same way to make sure FOXTEL will and Telstra will always have a leg up.
Those FTTN nodes? Those tens of thousands. Only Telstra's hands will be on those, and the coalition has put enough Telstra share holders on NBN Co's board to ensure that'll forever remain the case.
This isn't about agreeing or disagreeing. The coalition's policies are so pants on head stupid ass-backwards that there's hardly a word that could be said that isn't immediately pointing out its idiocies.
If people can't even put together ten words about the coalition's "NBN" policies without sounding stupid, then that's not a surprise.
And, if you haven't noticed, the coalition has already abandoned the pretense that it's going to be a national network.
So, it's not agreeing or disagreeing, nor is it slander. It's an object fact that it's not a country-wide Internet project any longer.
By all means, try me. If you have anything to say about the coalition's "NBN" policies I'll be happy to dismantle anything that's been presented to you as an actual thing but is really just a ridiculous pretense.
tl;dr: The coalition ain't interested in country-wide Internet. They're interested in delivering a "video entertainment system" because that's synergetic to Murdoch's interests and because it smells similar to the average drooling FOXTEL-subscribing moron in an election period to an actual broadband network that they've kept up the appearance of building. But when you get down to it, to the physical layer it's 1 Mbps for guaranteed coalition upload speeds vs. 1244 Mbps for Labor with fairly tiny contention to make it a little worse than that. All for about the same amount of money in peak funding and you don't want to know how much worse the coalition's is beyond that.
Can we not just slander because they don't agree with you?