What Happened With The NBN This Week?


POLITICAL S-S-S-SMACKDOWN! It’s the fight of the political century ladies and gentlemen, as this week we saw Senator Stephen Conroy and Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull go head to head on national television. FIGHT.

In the blue corner: he’s a one-time Liberal party leader with a point to prove about telecommunications…Malcolm “The Cable Cutter” Tuuuuuuuuurnbuuuuuuulllll! Meanwhile in the red corner: he’s recently backed out of a controversial internet filtering plan and blames his kids for messing with his iPhone: Stephen “The Fibrenator” Conrooooooooooooooyyyyy!

The arena? ABC’s Lateline program. The stakes? The tech credibility of each major political party. The fight? Bloody and petty.

The two political heavyweights duked it out on Lateline this week, with neither showing any sign of ceding precious ground to the other.

Amidst the squabbling, Turnbull did reveal that the base cost of the Coalition’s broadband plan came in at $15 million, while Stephen Conroy assured the viewers that despite what you’ve heard, the NBN is on track.

There’s lots of “hold on a moment”, “let me answer the question” and graph presenting for you to enjoy in the full interview.

Meanwhile, iiNet this week released a cheeky statement saying it was “number one in Fibre in Australia” after claiming to have connected 8000 iiNet customers to fibre through the TransACT network it bought a while back (which were already connected to fibre, mind) and a further 2700 connected to the NBN. Clever foxes.

Finally, Telstra has confirmed that it will start taking orders for NBN voice and data services this week.


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