Much of the discussion around the NBN has focused on the most end-user critical components – the last mile, the in-home setup, and the CVC charge – which are obviously incredibly important for providing service. It’s easy to get caught up in this exclusively, mainly because it’s both important and emotive, especially for those waiting for effective broadband. But after weeks of talking about the parts of the NBN that don’t exist, I’d like to talk about the things that will after 2020, and how important these will be in the long run.
It’s good to get some perspective on where Australia stands across developing countries when it comes to broadband networks. Most of the information that comes out when comparing Australia to states like the US, Canada, the UK and most of Europe are in regards to Akamai speed indexes – these are great for ridiculing our poor internet landscape, but useless when it comes to comparing current and future infrastructure investment.
Most network upgrades in almost all jurisdictions, currently, are left to private communications companies. In 2007, ten years ago, the Kevin Rudd announced that the Australian government would build out a fibre-optic broadband network to 93% of the country. This was the first step in almost full scale cancellation of any current or future infrastructure investment by any private company. Further nails would be hammered in via legislation and wins by the Gillard government in the next election.
In other countries, ten years is a very long time. Countless ISPs, including BT in the UK, Chorus in NZ and Google Fiber in the US plus countless others in Asia, Europe, Africa and South America have begun, finished and postponed plans to expand both copper, HFC and fibre networks. But most of these networks cover smaller areas, usually a single region or city, rather than across the entire country. Meanwhile, our network didn’t really start a proper build until 2011, passing barely 354,000 premises by 2013, and only hitting three million this year. Because most of those aren’t at a serviceable stage, only 1.1 million have active accounts. In comparison, roughly ten million people are still on DSL.
If the original timeline had been followed, and the issue wasn’t heavily politicised and tampered with, we would have a complete network by now, in some form. Our average speeds would easily exceed 25mbits and we’d be well up near the top of those rankings. In those ten years, however, the bulk of the list has barely budged – most countries bump up a mbit or two just thanks to higher take-up and gradual rollouts of FTTN/HFC/FTTP networks in specific areas.
We’ve slid down because our government wasted so much time, actual years, re-writing plans and running reviews, waiting for the ACCC to approve this or that, rushing engineering plans and attempting to jerry rig existing infrastructure for 2017 requirements. The political fight lasted so long that not a single commercial entity in this entire country was doing anything to increase speeds to residential users on a large enough scale to make any difference while they waited for the fight to end – which it did, officially, when the Abbott government won the 2013 election.
The point is, we’ve had largely ten years of inaction on improving average speeds. If the NBN had never existed, it’s almost certain we’d have FTTN with pockets of FTTP provided by Telstra, TPG, Optus and whoever else decided to pitch in. Most of this would be in metro areas; we’d have seen gradual bumps in speeds and we’d be sitting around the top-middle rankings with the UK and US. The regions would still be getting next to nothing, and it would have probably stayed that way for the near future.
The NBN is not perfect. It was likely never destined to be – the project was far too big and too important to be politically neutral, regardless of its popularity. But the fact it still exists in any form is incredibly important, and still makes it the largest single investment per capita in next generation networks in any country. It also comes at a time when other nations are struggling with a problem we are actively solving – how do you make building a single integrated data network to an entire country feasible?
Last week, Susan Crawford wrote a fantastic article for the tech blog Backchannel entitled “Google Fiber was doomed from the start”, which I highly recommend all of you read. It discusses, among other things, that Google’s ambitious plan to fibre up the US was doomed to fail as it quickly discovered why no one else was doing this – Fibre is cheap, but laying it is expensive. Labour accounts for 80% of the costs of FTTP deployments and directly eats into any long-term return – especially when you are working from scratch.
The US also has an insane patchwork of state-by-state, county-by-county laws that make any large-scale works on an NBN-like scale extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming, as battles with lawmakers, residents and other groups are almost certainly bound to occur. Therefore, Google Fiber didn’t even go near a city or region without being granted a mass level of support and guaranteed signups.
In Australia, things are a lot different – our telecommunications law makes it almost impossible for companies and individuals to stop development of telecom improvement works on premises. If it’s largely viable and doesn’t break existing setups, it essentially must be allowed. This was designed to prevent developers, councils and other companies from disallowing competitive networks in areas – particularly large office builds with multiple floors and tenants – from being forced to use a single provider.
What the NBN has done – and is doing, quietly and without controversy – is building regional infrastructure across the entire nation. It began with the private building of fibre networks in the early 2000s, and was bolstered by grants from federal and state governments, from Mobile Black Spot Programs to one of the NBN’s first benefits – the Regional Backbone Blackspots Program, a 6000km open-access fibre backbone network that stretches across all 70 major (and through many minor) regional centers, and links them up with the major capitals.
This network is backed up by several other existing backbone fibre optic networks owned by larger carriers. The second step was pushing the fibre out, like tree roots, across the landscape. We had all hoped that this would be directly into our houses. It’s now looking like at least a decade post-2020 for that sort of realisation, but the reality is that the NBN will push fibre from an average of 8km out to 400m (or closer). This will be, outside of the 3-5% of Fixed Wireless and Satellite customers, one of the widest fibre deployments in the world by distance.
Building a single network of fibre, even to nodes, dramatically reduces the future cost of any expansion. Telstra and Optus’s ill-fated side-by-side HFC deployment was a huge waste of time and money, especially for Optus, who effectively wrote off the deployment and didn’t even finish it. Both networks were not wholesale, nor was the fibre that supplied it, nor the backbone that fed it.
By 2020, we will have a single, open-access, wholesale network of fibre that stretches across almost every single region. Where before a company who wasn’t Telstra wouldn’t have even dreamed about it to a single residence – the costs would have been utterly insane – the possibility is feasible now. Even the eventual upgrade of a technology like HFC to FTTP, which realistically wouldn’t need one for a long time, is much, much cheaper.
These benefits stretch to a host of other technologies now – putting up smaller mobile towers on nodes or in areas where fibre would have had no original business case is significantly cheaper, allowing quicker and more cost-effective deployment of fifth and sixth generation wireless networks. The industry’s hoped-for successor to Wifi, LTE-U, relies on unlicensed spectrum but uses cellular equipment. Our new network is perfect for this to leverage off.
It means better access to smart energy grids. Smart traffic lights and signage. A host of data capable systems that would have originally needed to build in their own networks, which will now already be available. It was a network we would have eventually built, but it would have been a private patchwork – a mush of interconnected grids from councils, and private networks, funded from state and government grants.
I wish, like you, we had a 100% FTTP network. That is a given. It would have truly revolutionised our country for the long term and future proofed us in a manner that helped us to compete with similar networks in Asia. It would have taken longer and cost more, but it would have been worth it for the next half century.
But we are where we are. My default nature is always to remain optimistic, and I feel far too much of the focus has been on what we have done wrong over the past 10 years. But as NBN starts moving into the metro areas, after focusing so heavily on the regionals, more of us will start seeing some elements of change. Some bumps in the speed rankings if that is what makes you feel good. It’s what we don’t see, all that new pulsing lit and dark fibre rippling through our streets, that is the real MVP of this entire endeavour.
Don’t feel like all that $50b has been wasted. I assure you we have still done a good thing as a nation.