Rubenerd

Leith van Onselen wrote this for Macrobusiness about Australia’s National Broadband Network:

One of the biggest shortcomings of the NBN is that the Coalition Government chose to stick with the old copper network in many areas instead of rolling out fibre optic networks.

All of us in the industry warned about this, from the start. No politician can feign ignorance without lying to taxpayers.

While this decision saved money initially [..]

Isn’t that short-sighted politics in a nutshell? Sacrifice $100 in the future for $10 today.

[..] it has severely limited the NBN’s speeds and reliability.

And upgradeability. Change the optics on either side of the cable, and you can take advantage of technological advances with minimal extra investment. We’ve known about this for decades.

This was all 1) known, and 2) warned about when Malcolm Turnbull first proposed his economically and technologically-flawed multi-technology mix. This is pure, uncut politics.

Now that everything we said has come true, can we please do it right this time?