It’s been a couple of weeks since our last NBN wrapup. Let’s have a look at what’s been happening this week.
• Telstra may have been dragging its feet on laying fibre around the country, but they’ve got the bug now. According to Computerworld, Telstra has plans to roll out fibre in capital cities should the Libs get into power at the next election and scrap the NBN. Country Australia would be stuck on copper.
• A few weeks ago I told you that it wasn’t a matter of LTE vs the NBN, but that the two were complimentary. Funnily enough, Telstra agrees with me. ARN tell us that Telstra’s executive director of network and access technologies, Mike Wright claimed: “If you talk about NBN and you talk about wireless, they’re absolutely complementary to each other.” Bingo!
• Labor has always planned on selling off the NBN down the track, much to the disappointment of the Greens, but now the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network has voiced its concerns about privatisation, believing the monopoly would be too powerful to compete against.
• Malcolm Turnbull’s had a whirlwind tour of Asia to look at their broadband infrastructure, and he’s come back with excited eyes that South Korea kept their HFC cable. Currently, the plan is to shift the entire country to fibre and decommission both Telstra’s and Optus’s HFC cable. While the HFC won’t be able to compete with fibre in terms of speed, it will in terms of cost, and Turnbull’s argument to keep it in play is actually a good one, so long as the NBN is there to compete with it…