Right Pulse

Rudd’s household fibre to node network plans have been panned by Rupert Murdoch, who claims that Rudd will have to eventually right down half the asset value of the venture. I made a similar claim sometime ago. The US edition of the WSJ has also renewed its attack 0n the plan:

The NBN, a tremendously awful idea, is a case in point. The government wants to spend $39 billion to deliver 100 megabits to every household in the next decade, without the slightest idea how it might be done commercially or whether customers, who already can get 21 megabits through wireless in most of the country, would be willing to support NBN’s huge costs.

The government wants to seize Telstra’s wholesale network partly to eliminate competition—i.e., even as Labor castigates Telstra as a “monopoly,” it wants to create a true statutory monopoly.

Of course, it takes an unwonted faith in government to believe it will deliver the promised digital nirvana on-time, on-budget or at all. In the meantime, Telstra would have no incentive to invest in its own network, so Australia could end up with the worst of possible outcomes: neither a shiny new functioning government network nor an existing Telstra network that keeps pace with technology and customer demand.

These criticisms aren’t new. Virtually every local industry commentator has panned the idea, with the  advancement of household mobile broadband technologies likely to make the NBN irrelevant, the poor track record found in Japan of a similar venture and with major business and government organisations already with access to fibre networks. Then of course there are the issues with overseas fibre cables that allow households to access the internet outside of Australia. Is Rudd going to try to nationalise this infrastructure as well?