We must focus on moving forward with the NBN: Morrow

NBN Co chief executive Bill Morrow says it's time to stop discussing what the National Broadband Network will look like in the future and instead focus on getting the project back on track.

“If you fiddle around, if you continue to doubt and you take a left turn and then a right turn then nothing gets done and money gets wasted," Mr Morrow said told a Communications Alliance forum on the project in Sydney on Friday.

“So there is a point of time when you have to put your foot down and say this is it, we have to get the thing built,” he said.

Mr Morrow was speaking alongside Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Professor Henry Ergas on the findings of the recent Vertigan report into the NBN's viability. Mr Ergas is a member of the Vertigan committee.

Mr Turnbull was particularly scathing about what he calls the "backslash school of forecasting" – copying and pasting previous growth rates and extrapolating those into the future.

Critics have answered that observation by pointing out that to date data growth rates have been exponential, adding that the estimates by the consulting firm Communications Chambers which formed the basis of Vertigan’s findings grossly understate current demand let alone future needs.

Professor Ergas called on those critics to state their own baseline for future demand: “Tell me what assumptions you would like to make, if you don’t like our assumptions give me an internally coherent, empirically based set of alternative assumptions that will do better,” he said.

Mr Morrow added: “Have we forecasted truly all the demand that we’re going to see in the future? I don’t think we can.”

Flexibility in meeting those unknown future demands is one of the benefits touted by Ergas and Turnbull in their multi technology mix (MTM), as both the NBN Co and Vertigan committee claim the mixed rollout allows an easier upgrade path should demand turn out to be higher than they expect.

The MTM proponents also state this approach might deliver high speed broadband to many areas at a fraction of the cost of a fibre-to-the-premises network.

At NBN Co, the MTM is an opportunity to meet both time and budgetary constraints. “We have to drop our capital cost per premise in a radical sort of way,” Morrow told the panel. “This comes down to the need to leverage the infrastructure that already exists within the country.”

Professor Ergas added: “The real risk is whatever option you adopt you are going to be committing many billions of dollars of taxpayers’ dollars and you’ll also be putting on the line Australia’s telecommunications future.”

The Communications Minister condemned the state of Labor’s NBN rollout, saying the government had inherited a project that, while having a laudable goal, was “undertaken in a rushed in chaotic fashion”.

“That is certainly not something anything we would have undertaken and no other government in the world has undertaken and that gives you some idea of how unique the project is,” Malcolm Turnbull said.