blog So today is the day we’ve all been waiting for. The day when the Coalition finally releases its rival telecommunications policy to go up against Labor’s flagship National Broadband Network project. Sadly, so far we still don’t have the actual policy documents which detail the Coalition’s plans; they’ll (presumably) be released later today. What we do have is a series of limited leaks and briefings to conservative newspapers on the part of the Coalition, detailing that, as expected, the policy will require a little less capital to enact than Labor’s NBN and will focus (what else?) on fibre to the node technologies to replace much of Telstra’s copper. The Financial Review probably has the most detailed rundown (we recommend you click here for the full article). It reports:

“Under the Coalition’s plan, all Australians would have access to speeds of at least 25 megabits per second by 2016 … Under the plan, about 70 per cent, or roughly 9 million homes, would get “fibre-to-node” broadband by 2019.”

There’s also similar articles at the Daily Telegraph and The Australian, and Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull was also on ABC AM radio this morning. For those who’ll be following the nes throughout the day, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and Turnbull will be holding a joint press conference at 11 (we’ll be there); plus there’s a second technology journalist-specific teleconference with Turnbull later this afternoon. Let me know any questions you have and I’ll endeavour to put them to the Member for Wentworth at least. Delimiter’s approach today will simply be to report the news and let readers debate the issues. We’ll follow up with opinion/analysis later in the week and next week as the whole picture of the Coalition’s policy becomes clear.