So it's really about the cost, not the speed... No surprises there.

Turnbull got it right on NBN - Repost from Terry McCrann | Herald Sun

RIGHT now, over one million Australians are actually signed on to and using the National Broadband Network. When Labor lost office in September 2013 barely 100,000 were.

 So in just two and a half years the number of active users has leapt tenfold — an extraordinary rate of increase in both access and use.

 The total number of premises which are able to connect, when and if they choose, has similarly expanded at that spectacular pace, from around 250,000 then to approaching 2.5 million now.

The NBN is finally a done deal. There really is, or should be, no going back to the failed all-fibre $100 billion-plus fantasy of Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy.

 This real NBN is becoming increasingly pervasive across Australia and provided the current MTM — Multi-Technology Mix of fibre, HFC (hybrid fibre coaxial), and targeted and still very effective copper — build continues, almost all of Australia and just about every Australian will be connected by 2020.

 That’s to say, from 100,000 to everyone — around 10 million connections — in just seven years.

In contrast, try to go back to the all-fibre fantasy, and connections would dribble their way through the 2020s; maybe we’d all be connected by 2030.

 We’d all end up with the equivalent of a Rolls-Royce in the driveway, when most of us only want a SUV or a compact.

 Further when you then factored in price, continuing the analogy, we’d only be prepared to pay to drive that R-R as if it was a SUV or a compact.

 With the current proposed NBN, we will all be connected by 2020, as those who are connected now, to a fully functional seamlessly integrated 21st century NBN — not, as the all-fibre ‘gigabit geeks,’ complain, a ramshackle one.

Kevin Rudd's NBN plan was fantasy.

They are now and will be connected to an NBN which gives everyone access to sustained 25 Mbps (megabits per second) — which is as fast as most people want it: as fast as most people, even Netflix addicts, need: and most importantly as fast as they are prepared to pay for.

 For a truism from the 20th century is even more potent in the 21st: speed costs.

 That one million active user figure also now gives us sufficient scale to see what consumers are actually paying for — and actually paying for, in the era of Netflix.

 As our sister newspaper The Australian revealed, one in three consumers signed up to the NBN have opted for the slowest (and cheapest) 12 Mbps service. A further 47 per cent are on the 25Mbps. That means fully 80 per cent are happy with 25Mbps or slower.

 Apart from the handful of grumblers who get maximum airplay — and obviously, the inevitable ‘teething’ issues in such a vast, cross-Australia, groundbreaking technological, infrastructure and business exercise — almost all those users are getting exactly the fast broadband that they want.

This real NBN, the NBN that can actually be delivered at reasonable cost to the nation to build and so, critically, for consumers to then use, the NBN that works, is Malcolm Turnbull’s greatest and unqualified achievement in government.

 He did it by ditching Labor’s blank cheque fantasy fibre network which was initially going to cost $30 billion (Ha-Ha; and of course back then, Labor was also unveiling budget surpluses as far as the eye could see).

 But in reality, the cost was going on $60 billion and would have ended up at least at $100 billion or, who could possibly know, much more.

 Turnbull switched to an NBN that could actually be built, in fast time and at reasonable cost; so that (almost) all Australians could actually get fast broadband — as fast as they were really actually going to want and were prepared to pay for.

The current NBN connection plan is a winner.

 That’s as opposed to Labor’s fantasy fibre, that certainly gave the ‘gigabyte geeks’ hot flushes, but would neither be needed nor actually wanted nor willingly paid for by the other 99 percent of users. If and when of course it ever actually got near them. Turnbull’s ‘MTM NBN’ did two critical things, which dramatically hauled back the cost and build time.

 The first was switching some of the connections from fibre all-the-way to the premise (FTTP) to fibre to street nodes (FTTN). The second was to actually use the existing Telstra and Optus HFC (hybrid fibre coaxial) cables, used until now for Foxtel subscriptions-TV, telephony and ADSL broadband.

 The two cables already pass more than three million homes. It should have been self-evident madness to think of just abandoning them, to be replaced — eventually — by fibre.

 The critical thing to understand is that this technology switch maximises ‘fit-for-purpose.’ That’s to say, fast broadband to everyone, soonest.

 Going all fibre was — and still would be — the equivalent of digging up every suburban street over the next decade, to replace them all with divided four-lane roads. And if we take the analogy to the next ludicrous but all-too-real stage, then having a 40km/h speed limit slapped on those roads anyway.

 It’s all very well to have an NBN which can give everyone one-gig super warp-speed — if cost is no restraint; but utterly and wastefully pointless if literally everyone only actually wants 25 Mbps and is only prepared to pay for 25 Mbps.

 The other big thing that Turnbull did was to pick Bill Morrow to both build the NBN while also — no mean achievement — running it as a business at the same time. This year it will ring up $300 million in revenue, on the way to being cash-positive around 2018.

 Two other points in the wake of last week’s Australian Federal Police raids on various Labor premises — which by the by were way over the top and a total distraction from the real issues, from the real success, of the NBN.

 The first one is the shock-horror revelation from the leaks that NBN was going to have to spend money on remediating especially the Optus HFC cable. First, it was Labor that mandated that NBN had to spend $800 million to buy the Optus cable, to then basically junk it — just to stop somebody else buying it and building a competing network.

 On the same basis Labor forced it to pay $3 billion for the Telstra cable, to also basically eventually throw it away.

 The Turnbull switch actually puts those cables to effective use. Having to spend a few hundred million dollars to remediate them — the Optus one in particular had been basically left to decay — is a small outlay against the billions saved from not having to build fibre to nearly three million premises.

 Second point: when people blame the NBN for not delivering fast enough speeds, they should probably be blaming their service provider. Or themselves.

 NBN is only the wholesaler; it only provides the network. It is the individual service providers which would more likely be strangling speeds through a too-small neck into the NBN pipe, so to speak.

 And obviously, someone who has paid for a 12 Mbps service is not going to get a 25 Mbps one, far less the 100 Mbps which is available.

Source:  Terry McCrann | Herald Sun.  Article published on May 24, 2016.