Well, the stalemate was going to end in one of two ways: Either Labor were going to give in to Senator Nick Xenephon’s demands and supply the NBN business plan, or Conroy was going to go on a bloody rampage through the Senate until only politicians supporting the structural separation of Telstra were left to vote. The second would have made a more interesting telemovie, but with only a day left before Parliament goes on Summer vacation, the Government has coughed up a summary of the NBN’s business plan.
If you’re after a bit of light reading, you can download the PDF summary here. Worth quoting is the Equity requirement section, which might help you come up with some questions for Malcolm Turnbull:
6.7 Equity requirement
The equity requirement from Government based on our current plan is $27.1bn. This is based on advice from Goldman Sachs that NBN Co should be able to arrange debt funding.Irrespective of what amounts NBN Co decides to borrow, total funding requirements will begin to decline in 2021 (approximately when the rollout is complete), because at that point NBN Co will be generating cash from its operations in excess of any capital expenditure requirements.
From 2020 to 2022, NBN Co. will be replacing equity funding with debt funding until its reaches a steady-state debt:equity ratio of 1:1. NBN Co. expects to pay cash dividends, beginning in 2020, which in the aggregate would repay the government’s entire investment by 2034, even if no shares of NBN Co were sold to private investors. Since such dividends would be paid out of earnings, NBN Co. would continue to be appropriately capitalized and capable of being floated in the public market whenever the government chose to do so.
And in case you’re wondering, that map is from the business plan, outlining the 93% of the population covered by the fibre rollout.
Woodze
Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 4:24 PMWell I hope that stops Mr Tyson from deliberately shouting the wrong figure from the hill tops to scare people..
I would ask him that in the other post but every time I go in there the website tells me i’m logged in as Jack Terry? and if I try and log out all hell breaks lose!
Stephen Earp
Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 4:30 PMGood post Nick – I’m sure you’re bracing for the flurry of NBN-related stories to be coming out now this has been relased!
And we too, as loyal Giz readers, will brace for the impact also!
Nigel
Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 4:51 PMOkay so thats out of the way, can we just build it now, so I can get competitive broadband in my area!
Matej Pribelsky
Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 5:07 PMThis was supposed to be rolled out years ago!!! C’mon, just hurry up and do it already so Australians can finally have internet available at decent speed, not the painful crawl it is today.
Morris Lazootin
Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 6:01 PM$27 billion dollars… sounds like alot. Not really much when you compare it to other projects around the world.
For example. the US spent $58 billion dollars creating the nuclear waste disposal site at Yukka Mountain.
So for less than half the price of a nuclear dump, I say BRING IT ON!
KadeM
Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 7:52 AMBut you forget that the population of the US is over 310Million whereas we are little over 20Million so the amount per person cost is far greater for the NBN. Money doesn’t come from thin air.
The majority of supporters for the NBN still don’t understand the bottleneck that we have to the rest of the world and how this will not be addressed in the plan. Faster downloads is BS, think about where you get the majority of your downloads from? The same may not apply to games but latency is your enemy here, not bandwidth so again no likely improvement.
Maybe with everybody having access you may have to share this bottleneck with more people and that could slow your precious downloads down.
Truth is there is limited scope for improvement to the average joe unless you teleconference your neighbours.
matt
Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 10:06 AMbut the real joke is, despite all this, I can download faster from some server in Amsterdam than I can from my friend across the street.
for me, its all about domestic collaboration. maybe we can actually produce stuff for OUR SELF rather than leaching off the rest of the world for EVERYTHING.
any business collaborating internationally would be being monumentally screwed because of the dollar. we just need to do more stuff HERE for OURSELVES.
also, if your talking about our international pipes, I heard they weren’t even at 40% capacity.
wsDK_II
Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 12:06 PMI happen to work for Telstra and i can tell you that our international links are A LOT higher then 40% capacity – i cant give you the real numbers, but it is still impossible for even 5% of the population to receive 100mbps downstream simultaneously while receiving international content.
The NBN will not do anything to fix this.
boc
Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 1:06 PM@KadeM Don’t forget that the primary aims of the NBN initially are targeted at businesses and professional industries. That would benefit from national high speed/large bandwidth.
I do agree that the international links are the main problem for home users.
@matt Local content and a greater AU presence on the internet would be great and is something I’ve always wanted to see.
Mike Sadler
Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 5:36 PMI’m sorry @KadeM; you’re just plain wrong.
@sDK_II, you’re probably saying what you know, but what you know isn’t all the truth.
There is truckloads of bandwidth available across various ditches in various directions, with more and more coming online and some fairly substantial upgrades coming in the years ahead. This is NOT unique to Australia. Checkout Southern Cross Cable, PacNet’s new cable, the Pipe link via Guam, etc, etc. Look ‘em up (yes, I am definitely too lazy to Google for you). Just like it has in the past, this capacity keeps on growing AND getting cheaper. I suspect it would still be cheaper to deliver 100 GB at 100Mbps to San Jose, CA than to great chunks of Australia west of the GDR. C
heaper… that means the supply exceeds demand, doesn’t it? Ah.. yes Virginia. In Telstra’s case, their ‘provisioned’ links might be up to 70-80% full (at a guess, best practice, etc), but their available L1 transmission capacity (that they buy/turn up as they need and have since the 90′s – when their/the Australian ‘Internet’ link was increased to 45 Mbps!!!) is w-a-y in excess of that in use. So… very good planning by Telstra (and every other quality provider) means they are leasing ‘enough’ capacity off Southern Cross, et al, but have only the appropriate infrastructure in place (don’t quite need Exabit routers – yet) to ‘sell’ that bandwidth and grow it.
Is there enough bandwidth in Australia today to give ‘everyone’ 100Mbps simultanously? No. By the time we can all do 100Mbps? Yes, easily. Not least because:
a) we don’t all click at the same instant;
b) we won’t all buy 100Mbps, especially early on;
c) the bandwidth is ‘sold twice’… daytimes to business, night times (peak 20:45-21:15 AEST) to consumers so you never need to provision anywhere near what you ‘sell’ to the total of both demographics;
d) The industry now has 20 odd years experience (and records) with which to plan capacity.
Content overseas might be (comparatively) slow, but its always been the case that, movie studios and junk food vendors aside, the ‘normal’ website is purposely limited per connection to give everyone a fair go. As more folks in the Western world move to some type of 100Mbps tech (especially the USA), the more mainstream English language websites will continue to act with financial self-interest and so provide the speeds expected. If 26.7Mbps is ‘right’ for that content, then that’s what they’ll do; but not a moment before there’s folks demanding it because they’re now capable of the higher speeds. How many 3D TV shows are there broadcast now? Blu-Rays available? So… no 3D TV’s in shops… right? How many tablet centric websites? So, no buzz around tablets at the moment then?
@boc; I think one of the primary aims is ubiquity. It’s OK for Grandma to choose ‘just POTS’ when her Telstra service is cut across to NBN GPON (automatically). With a ubiquitous monopoly, its cusually heaper to do the same thing (‘radically simplify’) most places and then allow retail SP’s to differentiate based on value add, bundling, uniqueness., etc. Looking at a large benevolent monopoly’s network holistically, the ‘average’ cost, revenue, margins, etc can be better managed due to economies of scale not possible for any other Telco – including Telstra who have the regions to themselves but have to compete hard in the cities with multiple (poor) choices available to many consumers.
Joshua Ehmann
Friday, November 26, 2010 at 12:06 AMMike Sadler, heres a cookie. you deserve it!
personally i see the nbn as a great triumph over the hopelessness of letting private enterprise dictate whats available to us.
good things cost money, and doing things on the cheap is only going to get you so far.