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Part of the problem is how badly it has been planned and managed from the very beginning.

How fast is the actual rollout?

We don't know. Commercial-in-confidence. And NBNCo say they don't keep figures down to the street level anyhow (which begs the question of which basis they are using to pay contractors).

How much has already been borrowed? We don't know. Commercial-in-confidence.

How much has been spent? We don't know. Commercial-in-confidence.

Insofar as we have to dig up half the flaming countryside, FTTP is probably worth it on a long-term basis. But that doesn't excuse the project from normal project management requirements.

And it shouldn't be excused from being transparent to the Parliament and public. The abuse of commercial-in-confidence for companies completely owned by the government is a backdoor for politicians of all stripes to avoid budgetary accountability while still leaving states and the commonwealth on the hook for debts incurred.

Where was the proper front end cost/benefit analysis? There wasn't one. Where was the 3-5 years of planning, surveying and preparation? There wasn't any. Where is the proper contract management? Oh, I guess we'll let NBNCo contract it to Telstra who will contract it to an engineering firm who will contract it to that bloke who has a van and who used to work for Optus.

Ends are important. But for the amount of money spent, so are the bloody means.

I am so sick of this obsession with cost/benefit analysis.

How can you possibly quantify the future benefits of the NBN ? Nobody could have predicted that when the copper lines were installed that one day it would be primarily used for the internet. And the historic changes to the world economy it has caused. So why even attempt to do it ? Or why not just say it will cost $50 billion but result in $500 trillion worth of benefits.

Because without some rudimentary numbers like the ones he's talking about, everyone involved can escape accountability -- the politicians, the contractors, the public (since they can claim to have been "misled" and not feel guilty later), ... But mainly because it's an invitation to corruption, for people known to be highly corruptible.

You're right that cost/benefit analysis is hard for transformative things like this, but the citizens throwing their hands up and saying "I don't care WHAT it costs" is like Pavlov's bell to politicians.

If in the first place Labor had said "20 years, 100 billion", I for one would have found that plausible and -- yes! -- affordable.

When they promised it for 40 billion in 3 years ... well. No. That was never going to happen. Imagine how many streets there are in your suburb. How many suburbs are there in your city? How many in the country?

Somehow in just 750 working days they were going to source thousands of contractors, open hundreds of thousands of pits or dig thousands of new ditches, feed millions of kilometres of new cable, wire in millions of homes, install tens of thousands of new racks in exchanges without expanding the exchanges ... and somehow nothing would go wrong and nobody would fuck up and there'd be no asbestos or blocked tubes or inaccurate records or particularly tough ground or shonky contractors or labour shortages or bad weather or delayed deliveries.

3 years.

This is what makes me mad. We were promised an amazing thing and so many of my friends and colleagues took absolute leave of their senses over it. It's embarrassing. We bitch about salesmen promising impossible bullshit to close a sale ... and then we bought impossible bullshit hook, line and sinker.

Australia is not the first to do FTTP. You don't have to wait, its already available in many countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_premises_by_countr...

You can also look at how much people valued the additional speed, what new things they did, etc.

Wish someone would write an article summarising the overseas experience of FTTP.

Also, what is opportunity cost of NBN? Could we spend money to create a high-tech sector in Australia perhaps?

The ALP tend to use the NBN as a catch-all for tech policy - "don't worry we have innovation covered - its all the NBN".

> Wish someone would write an article summarising the overseas experience of FTTP.

Works well in Singapore. Just the cable that goes out form Singapore to, say, the US is not fat enough.

> How can you possibly quantify the future benefits of the NBN?

If this can't be done, even to an order of magnitude, then is the project worth pursuing?

If we allow spending decisions to be guided by Pascal's Wager, why aren't we spending infinite dollars on it? Why aren't we investing all our taxes into fusion reactors, flying cars and the fountain of youth?

> Or why not just say it will cost $50 billion but result in $500 trillion worth of benefits.

Because infrastructure decisions shouldn't be made by Dr Evil.

Spot on.

When government is spending taxpayers' money it doesn't care about efficiency, only about getting a slice of the pie. Family members, business partners and overcharging contractors feast on these multibillion dollar projects, and only them.

We've seen this happen with "Building the edu revolution", house insulation and so on. Porting bloody e-tax to Mac cost them $5.2 million.

The smaller the spending on NBN the smaller the waste.

Govt should focus on reducing friction for business, eliminating monopolies and building a healthy economy.

Competition and market forces can take care of the fiber just fine. If we had those.

Again with the competition/market will solve everything mantra. It's just rubbish.

If we leave it up to the market then only the profitable sectors will get high speed internet. The rest (i.e. rural and country areas, outer city, poor neighborhoods) will be left with the decrepitated copper system. How exactly does that help anyone or the economy ?

> Ends are important. But for the amount of money spent, so are the bloody means.

If the alternative was proposing to do the full project but address all those concerns that would be wonderful. But that is not the choice we have. And it may not be a realistic choice at all. Every single large project like this that has ever been undertaken has had these kind of problems. Look at the east west link in Melbourne - no business plan, no (public) cost benefit analysis, the whole thing commercial in confidence. I agree it's disgusting and in my view ideally would be unconstitutional (when it's our money, we get to see how it's spent - even if that inflates costs, that's the price of democracy, suck it up).

But the bigger problem is that we've manufactured a political environment where it's more expedient to hide all this stuff than to openly talk about problems, uncertainties and vision far into the future. Even your own words reflect that - you're criticizing them for problems in planning a project that is a one of a kind - never been undertaken before anywhere, and never will again. It's just an unrealistic expectation at some level that it can ever go perfectly.

I don't want perfection. I just want public money to be spent effectively. Infrastructure is important, but we should try to build the right infrastructure, at the right time, in the right way.

In the long run FTTP is the correct solution. In Turnbull's place I would have pushed for a slowdown on the rollout. No matter who does it, the NBN will probably not be finished in this decade.

(I had to create an account to respond to this)

"Light" and "electricity" only travel at the same speed in a vacuum. Neither fibre nor copper wire could reasonably be considered a vacuum; they have different propagation speeds.

Also, we are far removed from "gen 1 of fibre", which was developed in 1970, i.e. 43 years ago. If anything, we're currently developing "fifth gen" fibre optics communications.

Everything else you said is spot on, though.

Actually zmmmmm is correct about the speeds. The drift velocity of electrons in a conductor is quite low. Somewhere around 1 meter per second (its been a long time since my physics degree so it may not be exactly 1ms-1).

But what happens when you close a circuit of a conductor across a potential difference is an electric field is set up surrounding the conductor. This electric field accelerates all the electrons in the conductor at once. This is why even though the drift velocity of an electron in a conductor is very low, when you switch on a light switch the bulb lights immediately.

The propagation of the electric field is at the speed of light (its electromagnetism). So "electrons" move slowly but "electricity" moves at the speed of light.

Update: found a wikipedia page on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity

That's true, but light only travels at ~0.67c in a fibre optic cable. That's why I mentioned that fibre optic cables and copper wires are not vacuums.

According to wikipedia, electric field propagation through unshielded copper is 0.95c to 0.97c. Electric field propagation through standard coaxial cable is 0.66c.

Hence why zmmmmm was incorrect about the speeds: electricity in the copper wires is travelling faster than light in the fibre optic cables. zmmmmm didn't mention drift velocity, but that wasn't really related to his point.

Thanks for the refresher -- I recall being taught this in HS physics but I've never repeated it because I didn't want to look like an idiot trying to explain how "electrons" don't move at the speed of light.

> Gen 1 of fibre is already 10x better than the last generation of copper - how much better will generation 2, 3, 4 be? And fibre is potentially even more upgradeable than copper - it's just a channel for light, the throughput is limited by the boxes at either end which can be incrementally upgraded at low cost.

Not really. There is still a physical limit to how many light paths you can have in one fiber wire. If applications are relying more and more on available bandwidth and if more people or more connections are being made (and this is the case and it shows no signs of slowing down) you will want to increase bandwidth because the network will suffer congestion and then you are going to need to dig in the ground and install an additional bunch of physical cables. And that costs more than just tweaking the boxes at the edge of the network.

umm, light and electricity travel at the same speed ...

? Light travels at ~299m/s. This will slow down in a medium like fibre, but it's still faster than anything else.

At best, in a particle accelerator you can accelerate electrons to maybe 0.8, 0.9 c?

Surely you mean 299 000 000 meters/ second ?

Yes!

Yes, but the electric field that forms as a circuit closes travels at the speed of light.

I am not sure what you are talking about. When you push data down a wire you are definitely not close to c.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_delay

Which technology is being install that its "at the end of its generation". Surely FTTN will reduce the cost of FTTP. What is wrong with charging for FTTP - this is what UK is doing.

All of the curb side "nodes" that are full of gear to connect to DSL copper wires running down each street.