As parliament has been in winter recess, I too have taken some time to recoup and recharge. This is the reason posts have not been as free flowing as they were in the preceding months. But after significant amounts of procrastination I’ve dragged myself back to the keyboard as I’ve felt my rage against terrible governance has reached the point of bubbling over (again).

So what is it that has enticed me back to the ways of the keyboard warrior? Of all things, it is the comments of an executive of an obscure Singaporean telecommunications company that has inspired me. Now I know allot of you guys and girls aren’t tech heads, so allot of this will probably seem like ancient greek to you. But I want to talk about the NBN… because it’s something we as a nation never really talked about.

But more importantly, I want to talk about what the NBN was, and what it has become, and a theory I have as to how it got that way. I’m going to try and keep this as light on the techno-babble as possible, so please stay with me.

But first, as always, some background.

The NBN was announced as part of the election agenda for the 2007 federal election. It’s goal was to create a single Infrastructure system for Australia which would guarantee high-speed broadband to as much of the country as possible. Its secondary goal was to break the monopoly Telstra held over internet infrastructure in Australia. The reason for this was that under this monopoly, Australia’s internet infrastructure had begun to fall behind that of almost all other OECD nations and was coming in at second fiddle to even some developing countries.

The Labor government realised that it was essential for the government to retake the mantle of providing this internet infrastructure to the country as the decade-long experiment after the privatisation of Telstra had obviously failed. The reasons for this are complex, but in essence boil down to the fact that Australia, with it’s enormous landmass but tiny population, did not present enough of a return on investment for the market to ever provide door-to-door infrastructure. This is true not just for the internet, but for almost all utilities (and yes, in this day and age I’m calling the internet a utility).

The plan was to build an entirely new Network to replace that which currently existed. The copper phone lines would be retired and replaced with new fibre-optic cabling that would provide Australia with the information infrastructure it would need for the next hundred years, just as the Postmaster-General’s original copper network did in the early twentieth century. This network would be built consistently and access to it would be sold by a single wholesaler in order to create an even playing field for retail internet service providers like TPG, Telstra, and Optus. This was so that they would compete and provide the best product for the consumer, you.

Now I’m a fan of markets. I think when properly designed, they do in fact provide the best solution for consumers and are very efficient. This was part of the genius of the NBN; it used the government where necessary to build the new backbone network while allowing the free market to compete for customers, drive efficiency, and value.

The problem is that it never happened.

Ask any of your friends who work in IT and they’ll tell you, the original NBN wasn’t perfect, but the current one is shit-house; just ask the co-founder of MyRepublic, the disruptive internet service provider from Singapore who David Thodey (the outgoing CEO of Telstra) labelled as one of the company’s biggest potential business adversaries.

The new design is a hodge-podge of four or five different networks, all running at different speeds and all run by different companies. I dare you to go and order the fastest broadband available at your address, $5 says you won’t be able to do it because you’ll only check with one or two of the four companies that have run some kind of cable past your house.

Just for comparison, I’m going to list the different networks that would have made up the old NBN against those that make up the new system (atleast in metro areas).

Old NBN: One network (NBN fibre to the home)

New system: Eight networks (NBN fibre to the home, NBN fibre to the node, NBN Hfc Cable, Telstra HFC cable, Telstra fibre to the home, Optus HFC cable, TPG fibre to the home, TPG fibre to the basement).

Oh and to top it all off, five out of those eight networks are significant slower than the old NBN would have been…

As I’m sure everybody who has been around for the last five years knows, the coalition was not a fan of the NBN and never has been. Among their primary concerns was the fact that the new network was, admittedly, astronomically expensive. Now for quite a while I believed that this was the legitimate concern the coalition had with the project. Afterall, they are the party of small government and small spending (not that they’re doing a great job now). But slowly I began to question this as their response to the NBN became more and more convoluted and confusing.

Something just didn’t add up, and it all revolved around Turnbull.

Malcolm Turnbull has been involved in the IT industry in Australia in one way or another for decades. He’s a very smart man and know’s his stuff when it comes to broadband. So why then was he advocating for a solution that would end up totally inferior to the original design, when a solution to the costs problem had already been put forward which would have ended up with all the advantages of the original NBN design without the enormous price tag.

For those of you wondering, Simon Hackett, the guy responsible for both of those articles, was the founder of Internode; the ISP that was considered Australia’s best by pretty much any nerd you can find.

How did we end up in this situation? How did we end up with what is obviously the wrong solution? Is it because of internal pressures such as Tony Abbot’s obvious inability to understand that technology tends to grow (here’s a hint, the broadband speed that Tony Abbot claimed was “more than enough” for modern users was just labelled as the absolute minimum standard to be legally called broadband by the FCC). Or was it something external.

Now I’m going to delve into hypotheticals for a bit here, because who doesn’t love a good conspiracy theory (for the record, I’m not actually trying to say this is the sole reason for the coalition’s policy decisions, just that it’s something interesting to think about).

See there was quite a concerted effort in the media, along with the coalition, to paint the NBN as something akin to a policy armageddon. This sustained media attack is, I’m sure, part of the reason why there was never a reasoned debate around how to properly tackle the issue of the cost of the NBN. But why would the media in Australia be so anti-NBN?

The internet is a tool for business growth. It is an enabler for businesses; particularly small, disruptive, modern businesses. But when any business grows it tends to correspond with another business shrinking. There are, after all, only so many customers and they can only buy so many products. So instead of looking at the company that stood to gain the most from the NBN, I want to look at the one that stood to lose the most.

High-speed broadband has led to the rise of an entirely new method of delivering media to customers. Online streaming and movie downloading services such as Netflix have rapidly begun to take over the market as they provide a more targeted product to customers for one-tenth of the cost of traditional pay-tv services. Now in Australia we only have one major pay-tv provider and they’ve enjoyed a monopoly over this market for quite some time; a monopoly I’m sure they would like to protect. I’m talking of course about Foxtel.

It just seems convenient to me… you know; how Foxtel, the company that stood to lose the most from Australia having high-speed internet, is half owned by Fox… or as they’re more commonly known in Australia, News Corp; the company that prints all the newspapers.

And of course, who owns News Corp? Tony Abbott’s favourite evil-emperor impersonator, Rupert Murdoch.

Now as I said, I’m not suggesting that this was all some great big plot to sabotage Australia’s internet infrastructure. But it is interesting that the man many people criticise for having too much influence over Australian politics (particularly the conservative side), had a very real vested interest in seeing the growth of high-speed internet in Australia slowed as much as possible.

As always I really appreciate everybody’s amazing support!
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