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