As technology continually moves forward, so the National Broadband Network continually fails. It was all supposed to be finished by this year, but most Australians haven't seen anything of it. Now the Turnbull gov has had to loan the NBN another $20billion to carry on it's rollout. On top of the $30billion they've already loaned it.
So what are taxpayers getting for their $50billion? Which isn't even being counted in the budget BTW as it's a loan. We're getting copper. A dogs breakfast of fibre optics connected to copper. Turnbull's even had to buy copper for it because the old phone system is so deteriorated in some areas it's not possible to use it for that. It all costs money to fix, something that wouldn't be so with fibre all the way to the home.
However the biggest problem, and I said this a while ago, is the old technology being used to set it all up. Not only the costs now of doing so, but the costs in the future of fixing it. And it will have to be fixed at some point. There's things like quantum computing on the horizon, and already last year even there was 2Gbps internet speeds being set up in the US (albeit very expensive). The gov is basically installing a 1995 version of dialup, only it's the 2016 version, if that makes sense. It'll be obselete by the time they finish the rollout.
Talk about lumbering future generations with debt. How much is it going to cost to replace the copper with fibre in the long run?
PricewaterhouseCoopers has estimated that the network will be worth just $27 billion in 2024-5, approximately half the price of its construction.
The new $20 billion loan is an unanticipated commitment from the government. Malcolm Turnbull had previously indicated that the organisation would be able to operate “without assistance from government” with only the initial funding.
It’s more money than the $14 billion the government hopes to save over the coming four years with planned policy changes.
Labor communications spokeswoman Michelle Rowland told SBS the biggest threat to the NBN is "its limitations which have been imposed as a result of technology", specifically the reliance on the existing copper network. SBS
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