Eleven years ago the Rudd federal Labor Government announced the intention to build a National Broadband Network delivering super fast broadband to Australian homes and workplaces: 93% via Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) and 7% via Fixed Wireless/Satellite.
Several years later the Liberal Party came into power and the Abbott and Turnbull governments promised that the NBN would be built faster and cheaper with a multi technology mix including FTTP, FTTC, HFC, FTTN, FTTB, Fixed Wireless and Satellite.
The CEO of NBN now says that the NBN is on track for completion in 6 weeks at the end of Q2 2020. NBN’s completion target is 11.5 million residences ready to connect and about 300,000 of these were not done by the end of Q1 2020.
Sydney Trains says it has achieved “on time running” when at least 92% of peak services arrive within 5 minutes of when they’re supposed to.
In a similar way NBN will count their initial rollout as “complete” mid year even though 100,000 residences have been put in a too hard basket and left to try to connect them again at a later date.
Of the residences that can connect to the NBN about 63% have done so. This is because of various reasons — eg. the people who live in the other 37% are still connected to ADSL and the copper lines in that area haven’t been cut off yet, or they can’t afford to connect or they only use their mobile phone for the internet.
NBN’s Chief financial officer Philip Knox told AFR that the cost per premise of the rollout was higher than projected in the corporate plan, because of more work required at some locations than expected.
This will not come as a shock to Ausdroid readers who are unlucky enough to have troublesome FTTN or HFC connections where the poor quality of their neighbourhood copper phone lines or old deteriorated Telstra cable network has caused NBN to do constant remediation work to keep things running.
Regardless of whether you’re in the group of people who wish for the “full fibre” approach or think the multi-technology mix has been a good enough solution, no one can deny that the NBN is better than the decaying old Telstra ADSL copper line network.
Don’t forget that if the NBN project hadn’t started and it had been left to the private sector to do what it wanted the best Australia could have hoped for is super fast broadband for those lucky enough to live in richer areas of our big cities, like the TPG FTTB rollout.
