COMMENT
Election 2016: Labor's NBN policy
Labor's NBN will deliver faster speeds for Australians says Shadow Communications Minister Jason Clare. Vision ABC News 24.
PT2M6S 620 349With Prime Minister Turnbull spruiking innovation but struggling in the polls, time is running out for people hoping he'll backflip on the hotch potch Multi-Technology Mix NBN.
Opposition leader Bill Shorten has finally put his cards on the table, promising should Labor win government on July 2 it will instruct NBN Co to stop rolling out fibre to the node (FttN) in favour of deploying fibre to the premises (FttP) – running fibre all the way to people's homes.
The change would mean that fibre would run to "up to two million more" Australian homes and businesses, doubling the size of the FttP footprint. It would also ensure that all new greenfields estates were fitted with fibre.
Prime Minister Turnbull had plenty of chances to backflip on the Abbott-era NBN plan, will he risk it this close to the election? Photo: Angus Mordant
Shorten's policy is not a return to Labor's original plan to run FttP to 93 per cent of Australian premises, serving the rest via satellite or fixed-wireless. Should Labor win this election, Shorten proposes to keep the HFC pay TV cable networks in the NBN mix – it's a done deal which will serve about a third of Australian premises.
It was never realistic to think at this point that Labor would ditch Telstra and Optus' metro-centric HFC networks in favour of a full fibre rollout. The NBN is set to connect the first HFC customers in the next few months and scrapping it now would be a significant setback to the rollout timetable and the economics of a project which needs more paying customers fast.
Right now the HFC cable networks are groaning under the load but experts like Simon Hackett agree that they are capable of delivering fibre-like performance – even though he still favours fibre. HFC is up to the job if the backend infrastructure receives a significant overhaul, but of course that's a big "if". Should corners be cut then those customers might wish they were stuck on FttN.
A Shorten government won't tear out existing FttN deployments, just as the incoming Abbott government didn't rip out the fibre from the early FttP suburbs. The good news for Australians destined to rely on FttN is that Shorten promises to commission Infrastructure Australia to develop an upgrade plan to eventually get them onto FttP.
HFC could eventually be the NBN's bottleneck but at this point we need to work with what we've got.
Two weeks out from the election, time is running out for people clinging to the hope that Turnbull's support for the Multi-Technology Mix NBN was all a ruse and he secretly plans to inject more fibre into the mix. Several NBN reports presented Turnbull with the opportunity to change his stance on the MTM rollout while saving face, but he stuck to his guns.
When Turnbull took power he looked a shoo-in to defeat Shorten at the next election, but this was in part due to unrealistic expectations that the progressive Turnbull was some kind of messiah who would change the country's direction on many key issues. That kind of wishful thinking has crept into coverage of the NBN debate.
Only Tony Abbott could make Malcolm Turnbull look like Gough Whitlam, but now that reality has sunk in Shorten has gained significantly in the polls.
The fact Turnbull is struggling in the polls adds pressure to respond to Labor's NBN policy, but the Prime Minister has staked his credibility on the Multi-Technology Mix approach. He had the chance to tweak the mix but at this point even conceding a small change would hand a big propaganda win to the opposition.
The NBN battlelines have been drawn, you might not be happy about where the lines have been drawn but don't get your hopes up about them moving before the election.
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