NBN’s $3bn fibre revamp is great news but don’t Australians now care more about price than higher speeds?
Share:
The demise of NBN’s fibre-to-the-node technology is welcome but making the internet more affordable would have a much bigger impact. The announcement of the demise of NBN’s fibre-to-the-node technology will be welcomed by those who have endured poor speeds and service for the past few years, but making the internet more affordable would have a much bigger impact.
When Tony Windsor sided with Labor in the 2010 election, he put the NBN as one of the key issues, saying famously: do it once, do it right, and do it with fibre. It’s taken nearly 15 years but we have just about met Windsor’s last point, with the Albanese government announcing on Monday that about 95% or 622,000 homes currently accessing the NBN via fibre-to-the-node (FTTN, which uses existing copper lines from the node to the premise for connection) will be able to upgrade to full fibre by 2030 at an additional cost of $3bn.
The Coalition’s promise (which we can see echoes of in the nuclear debate today) when they came to power in 2013 was that the multi-technology mix, as it was called, would be rolled out quicker (it wasn’t) and would be more affordable (it also was not). Years of successive governments giving NBN Co funding injections, or loans, has meant that incrementally the NBN by 2030 will now more closely resemble the original plan but has ended up costing a lot more.
On a business level, Monday’s announcement is a smart plan: FTTN has historically been much more expensive for NBN Co to maintain. In 2022, the company said FTTN faults were four times higher than fibre-to-the-premises, stating “a fibre-based network is therefore less complex as well as less costly to operate and maintain”.
