Rudd’s fantasy NBN, Turnbull’s reality

THERE’S a veritable host of exquisite flavours to the way Kevin Rudd is going around trying to claim that HIS NBN would have been – miles and miles – better than the one we have now almost completely actually got, Malcolm Turnbull’s.

None is more exquisite than the fact that we only got to get Turnbull’s NBN – indeed in truth, ANY NBN – because of the man they both despise, Tony Abbott, who saw off both of them and saw off both of them twice.

If we’d tried to keep building Rudd’s all-fibre (mostly) NBN, we’d be lucky if one-in-10 homes were now able to be connected; and the cost would be spiralling right out of control towards $100 billion.

When he launched it in 2009, he promised it would be finished in eight years. By 2013, after four years under Labor’s management, only a handful of homes were even passed by fibre; an even smaller handful were actually connected TO the fibre; and a yet tinier fraction were operating. And billions had been spent.

The ‘gigabit geeks’ and Rudd can bleat all they like, but it is all-round better to have 70 per cent, heading quickly to 100 per cent, of Australians able to get fast broadband – as against, say 10-20 per cent able to get unnecessarily faster broadband.

Further and critically, those ‘lucky’ ones in the Rudd alternative NBN universe would be having to pay much, much more for their broadband because of the much greater sunk cost and the much smaller number of subscribers.

At its most basic, the ONLY way to have actually got a working NBN, getting it much quicker – and at least half financially responsible and functional – was by using the existing telco infrastructure.

Apart from anything, anyone holding to the fantasy of all-fibre to everywhere, presumably has never actually looked around Melbourne, Sydney and so on – the topography, the spread and design of the existing housing stock.

Despite the bleating from Rudd and the ‘gigabit geeks’ we have a NBN which has now reached more than 70 per cent of premises and well over half of those have connected.

They are mostly getting and, again mostly, getting seamlessly the high, effectively 44 Mbps, speed they pay for, they want, and all they need.

The raw number of complaints might seem large, but in relation to the near-5 million operating are tiny.

And of course, ‘the NBN’ gets blamed for everything when the major culprits have been the RSPs stuffing up connections and trying to cheapskate on the bandwidth they buy.

It would have been no different with all-fibre – the same problems, just more expensively.

It’s another fantasy to believe that if the NBN value was written down, we’d get cheaper rates. Although on the same logic the writedown on the Rudd version would have been eye-wateringly similar to his budget deficits.

Finally, apropos of nothing really, I hadn’t realised that Abbott and Rudd are almost exact contemporaries, born just six weeks apart. Hmm