Mr Turnbull will define ''fast'' broadband as 25 megabits per second download speeds, about six times faster than today's average speeds, and similar to the fastest speeds available in today's market.

The Coalition's NBN will cost $20.4 billion in capital expenditure versus Labor's $37.4 billion, and will be finished by 2019. Labor's NBN, which has suffered a series of delays, is due to be finished in 2021.

The Communications Minister Stephen Conroy called the Coalition's policy ''an extraordinary waste of money''.

''Malcolm Turnbull is going to spend $20 billion to build a second rate broadband network, and yet despite that millions of Australians will get no improvement on what they've got today,'' he told Fairfax Media on Tuesday.

While 93 per cent of Australians will get the fastest possible technology under Labor's plan, Mr Conroy said Mr Turnbull was ''disconnecting the NBN for millions and millions of Australians'' by using cheaper technology.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/coalition-to-pledge-cheaper-nbn-all-round-20130409-2hi4h.html#ixzz2PvRPLDaI

Outgoing ABC managing director Mark Scott was fortunate that Senator Sam Dastyari was leading the charge at Senate estimates on the ticklish issue of whether Aunty’s in-house tech editor Nick Ross had been leant on by editorial higher-ups.

Ross contends that prior to the 2013 election he was urged to go soft in his reporting of Malcolm Turnbull’s version of the national broadband network (NBN).

Dastyari is not the most forensic of questioners, often interrupting his own questions with subordinate questions, or elongated subterranean qualifications and distractions. He also has the disturbing habit of tossing in the word “right?” as an interrogatory at the end of a lot of his sentences.

Scott had no trouble batting away this pesky line of inquiry about the ABC wanting to stay sweet with the then opposition and its communications spokesman.

Nick Ross was the man who had built-up a fearsome body of knowledge about the NBN and was of the belief that the cheaper Turnbull fibre to the node version had not been costed properly and would not function adequately, particularly as demand for things like online health services increased.

Ross is an advocate of fibre all-the-way-home – an approach that ran into strife with ABC management because, according to Scott at Tuesday’s Senate estimates session, this was not in tune with ABC’s requirements for balance.

Scott was critical that an 11,000 word article by the technology editor – critical of Turnbull’s NBN – had been published by the ABC without “upward referral”. Nothing of this astonishing length had previously been published by the national broadcaster.

There was another piece by Ross, that had been buried, critical of the use of the copper network – a key component of Turnbull’s cheaper and allegedly more speedily rolled out NBN.

The managing director told his Senate interlocutors that what current affairs manager Bruce Belsham wanted was “a plurality of viewpoints”, in compliance with the ABC’s editorial policies.

An ABC journalist is required to conform to the corporation’s obligation to be “fair, accurate and balanced” – a bit like Fox News.

That is all very well, but it didn’t manage to dispel the lingering suspicion that this tech journalist was causing too much political grief for Aunty and that he should go and get himself some “insurance” in the form of critiquing Labor’s fibre-to-the-home model.

Dastyari asked Scott in the hearing about a conversation Ross surreptitiously recorded with Belsham. Dastyari said that the recording showed Belsham saying that if the article on the shortcomings of the NBN’s copper component is published then “the Turnbull camp and my superiors are going to come down on me like a tonne of bricks”.

That is not quite the same as urging him to stick to the editorial guidelines and do all sides of the story.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/10/fair-accurate-and-balanced-the-abc-of-the-nbn-reporting-saga

Malcolm's NBN is not an NBN. It is an old telephone network with some blue cable joining some hubs... The rest is shit.  See toon at top...

The Government's reliance on copper means cheaper prices but lower speeds, more dropouts and higher maintenance costs for broadband users, the outgoing boss of the National Broadband Network (NBN) has said.

• Multi Technology Mix (MTM) cheaper, even after accounting for higher faults, NBN boss says
• He says many problems with rollout due to quality of existing infrastructure
• Original NBN model would have meant higher speeds and less faults, he says

In a paper published by the NBN, Bill Morrow outlined the problems plaguing the rollout, many of which he attributed to the Multi Technology Mix (MTM) model adopted by the Coalition Government.

The original NBN model used fibre to each premise, which Mr Morrow said would have meant higher speeds and less faults, but would have cost more.

"The first and most notable consequence is the maximum speed limitations of copper versus the previous fibre-based model," he said.

"The use of copper in the last [approximately] 1 kilometre of the network is the increased fault rate and operating costs versus the all-fibre alternative."

But he said the MTM is cheaper, even after accounting for the higher faults.

"These incremental costs are factored into the improved economics and are a small fraction of the incremental costs to build fibre to every home," he said.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-27/nbn-boss-attributes-network-proble...

Rubbish economics. Read from top...