The election is imminent, and the NBN remains a political hot potato, with contentious studies, allegedly bulletproof costings and a truly bizarre filtering plan amongst this week’s NBN news.
Malcolm Turnbull made a grand stage of showing off a VDSL2 installation in Sydney as an example of his NBN vision, while at the same time admitting that actually changing the current NBN plans might take some time, possibly up to a year. Quite what this means in terms of the promised 25Mbps-by-2016 pledge is anyone’s guess.
While there was much criticism of the Coalition’s general costings once they were finally released, just prior to that Tony Abbott was resolute that the FTTN NBN costings were “absolutely bulletproof“.
A study suggested that by the end of the decade the average Australian household may be $3,800 better off; a little more in the case of older Australians.
The rollout speed of the NBN has remained a contentious issue, and that’s left a lot of people on copper ADSL2+. iiNet’s arguing that Telstra should remain tightly constrained by law in this respect until the NBN is completed, while Optus is arguing that wholesale costs should be lower because Telstra’s got a source of NBN revenue for its ducts.
The NBN and Internet filtering were first put together by Stephen Conroy, but we figured it was dead and buried. A bit like the classic Monty Python parrot, it was suddenly revived, and then spectacularly killed off again by the Coalition last night. We’re still not sure why.