Call waiting ... Abbott on his Blackberry during Pollie Pedal in April. Credit:Mark Nolan Labor plans to spend $43 billion on a nationwide fibre network supporting speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, whereas the Coalition will spend $6 billion on a mishmash of technologies that will include upgrading existing copper networks and more wireless to support a 12 megabit per second peak speed. "I'm not sure that we should assume that just because wireless is today slower than fibre cable that it's always going to be slower than fibre cable," Abbott said on Q&A. "All of the people who are using their BlackBerries or their iPhones, Facebook, all of the people who are sitting in cafes and hotels rooms doing their work, they're all using wireless technology and we shouldn't assume that the only way of the future is high speed cable." The Coalition questions whether people will really need the bandwidth provided by a fibre network, but experts say its comments betray a fundamental misunderstanding of internet technologies and future needs.

John Lindsay, carrier relations manager at ISP Internode, said the Coalition's broadband policy is "just technical ignorance on a national scale and frankly Australians deserve better than that". "Inside the industry the view is that they don't really know what they're talking about and that they've just rehashed [their policy from] 2005," he said. Huston, an expert in internet architectures, said it was extremely challenging to "get high speed data through the air" and the limited availability of wireless spectrum meant we would fast run into capacity problems. "What's going to happen with wireless is that as we crowd it, only those with the deepest pockets will be able to afford it, so rather than being a communications medium for everyone, it becomes only a medium for the few who can afford to pay," Huston said. "For the same $50 a month that people pay for a couple of gigabytes of wireless, they can get 10-20 times that amount of data down the wire - wireless has its role but it also attracts a premium price."

Internode's Lindsay said wireless was inherently slower than fibre because it was a "shared access medium". Wireless was also prone to drop-outs and spectrum constraints - Lindsay said Abbott had completely misunderstood the carrying capacity of radio networks. If average home broadband use was transferred to wireless technologies, a user "would need to be a multimillionaire like Malcolm Turnbull to be able to afford the bill". "Wireless is a brilliant technology to support the low bandwidth associated with mobility," he said, giving examples such as checking email on the go and browsing web pages on mobile phones. "But if you wanted to build a wireless network that would be a viable substitute for fixed line ADSL you would need to put a wireless base station at the end of every street." Already, this election campaign has seen an uproar by residents of the Sydney electorate Bennelong over the installation of a single new mobile tower by Optus.

The Internet Industry Association chief executive, Peter Coroneos, said wireless networks were already having capacity issues and there was no way the technology could support future broadband applications such as e-health initiatives, high definition video conferencing and smart metering for people to monitor their electricity use online. "We've been disappointed by the Coalition's approach to broadband," Coroneos said. "The experts in the industry seem fairly unanimous that fibre is the ultimate long-term solution ... the sooner we build, the sooner we start seeing revenue flow from the technology and the better placed we are to leverage lower costs that won't necessarily be with us in the future." Coroneos said that, in 1904, when street lighting came to Sydney, the mainstream view of the population was that electricity was for lighting. There was nothing in the public consciousness that pointed to electricity as being a revolutionary technology for both the home and for factories, which was only realised decades later. "We use the same analogy for broadband, which is to say you can't just look at today's use of the internet - that is the equivalent of saying electricity's great for lighting," he said.

Coroneos said a nationwide fibre network would enable applications such as home high definition video conferencing "where we could spend the afternoon with our family overseas with the use of 3D glasses and a super-fast broadband connection". It would also improve healthcare and open up new business models for the content industry, which is today struggling with rampant piracy. On Q&A last night, Abbott said that, even if we could get 100 megabits per second capacity, 70 per cent of the sites Australians use were hosted overseas making us "dependent upon more than just our own broadband". He also said the Coalition's plan for a $700 per household investment in broadband - far less than Labor's $5000 per household plan - was comparable to the kind of investment in other countries such as Singapore, New Zealand and South Korea. Coroneos queried where Abbott was getting his advice from and said there were already high-speed underwater fibre cables capable of carrying Australian internet traffic overseas at speeds of more than a terabit per second.

"Australia is a bigger country and nation-building investments will necessarily cost more per capita here - that's just a function of our relatively low population and our size," he said. "But we don't deny ourselves more roads and more infrastructure simply because it will cost more. We realise that that comes with the territory of being so large and having a small population." James Spenceley, chief executive of wholesale ISP Vocus, rejected Abbott's claims that wireless could ever come close to being as fast as fibre. But he said wireless was a viable technology for regional areas and questioned the sense of spending large sums to lay fibre cables across the country. "In a lot of cases wireless is a perfectly good solution, especially in regional areas," he said. He said fibre by its nature was always going to be faster than wireless, but the question was whether wireless was fast enough for whatever people wanted to do. Existing copper networks, he said, could also be upgraded down the track to deliver speeds of up to 100 megabits per second.

"I think the Coalition's plan is more realistic, $43 billion is a lot of money ... you don't need to throw the baby out with the bath water, the copper network is pretty good in the cities and will continue to evolve." A spokeswoman for the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, said Abbott had shown once again that he didn't understand broadband and the Coalition's policy would relegate Australia to the digital dark ages. "Tony Abbott's broadband policy is a patchwork, not a network – it relies on old, slow and inferior technology and Australia deserves better," the spokeswoman said.