The news story of the day is NBN seeking to employ some 4,500 new employees in order to speed up construction. Anything that gets Australians better broadband is a good step, but there’s still plenty of spin here.
Image: G Meyer
It’s being widely reported — you can read IT News’ take here, SBS’ take here or CRN’s take here that NBN — it’s dropped the “Co” in a move that pre-election no doubt would have brought forth cries about wastage — is seeking to hire some 4,500 additional workers to handle the sheer mass of telco work needed to get the “MTM” version of the NBN up and running by 2020.
In one sense, great. NBN is getting on with the job as it’s been handed. Actual spending on training Australians in new trades is, likewise, no bad thing per se. The need for trained telco staff hasn’t changed under the switch from a mostly-fibre NBN to a mostly copper MTM network.
I’m still reluctant to use “NBN” as a descriptor for what we’re actually getting, given that it’s such a hodge-podge of technologies, mixes and changed expectations. There’s still not guarantees on speeds, either downstream or upstream, there’s huge variance in areas depending on where you happen to live and whether a fibre connection was already too far in the planning stages to be cancelled along the way to lay in line with existing LNP policy.
Because, have no doubts, the “NBN” we’re getting is still very much a creature of party politics more than it is actually “good” policy. There was significant ground to be made pre-election in making capital out of delays to the NBN, and the sad truth there is that yes, the ball was dropped, and repeatedly.
Now the ball is on the other foot, or, arguably, it’s being dropped from that self-same foot. The LNP promise was for a minimum 25Mbps connection for all Australians by 2016.
That won’t happen.
It can’t happen.
It will, by that measure, run late. Worse than late, actually, because in that time, the 25Mbps “promise” has been watered down to allow for connections that might be capable of 25Mbps, but aren’t actually guaranteed to do so. In some cases, your existing ADSL2+ connection could be better.
Even allowing for the MTM mix to “count” as part of that rollout, the signoff for Optus to hand over its HFC cable system still isn’t finalised, although it does have ACCC approval, and then there’s the matter of bringing that infrastructure and Telstra’s together in some way that can then be “sold” to ISPs to then be sold on to customers. Meanwhile, in FTTN land, trials continue as they need to, but that’s a different beast to actual implementation, just as it was with FTTP. It’s a solid step forwards to announce the intention to hire and train loads of new workers, but both of those processes take time to actually happen. In the meantime, FTTP rollouts that were on the books were cancelled, and even allowing for delays due to complexity, those are rollouts that in the eighteen or so months Malcolm Turnbull’s held his portfolio could have been either completed or well on the way to being completed.
It’s a masterful piece of spin in one sense; where FTTP delays were widely parlayed as “catastrophic” by Malcolm Turnbull while he was in opposition, he’s now presiding over a “plan” to see the NBN “finished’ by 2020, with nary a mention of the fact that his own leader stated on the eve of the election that there would be “no excuses” but that “I want our NBN rolled out within three years and Malcolm Turnbull is the right person to make this happen.”
Again, won’t happen, and you could point to the delays in the fibre NBN as proof that these are complex systems and a certain degree of delay is inevitable. Maybe I’m going over old ground here, but here’s the future reality if we accept 2020 as the “finish” date for the NBN, leaving aside those pesky issues around eventually replacing the copper and making it fibre later on at even greater cost, that is.
The future reality is that by 2020, even if we do have our 25Mbps (barely adequate right now, certainly inadequate then by world standards) downloads and no-promises uploads, we’ll be able to look back at a decade of Australian government broadband policy, and you know what we’ll see?
The broadband ball was dropped, again and again. No, the Labor NBN implementation was by no means bulletproof in its implementation, and it would be ludicrous to claim that was the case. But for the latter half of the decade, the decisions and policy and rollout lies at the feet of Malcolm Turnbull, and what we’ll end up with will be second or maybe third-best quality at marginal savings to prove a largely political point.