Give the Coalition an inch on the NBN, will they take everyone's last mile?

The National Broadband Network is back in the headlines this week after Malcolm Turnbull's address to Australia's tech media at the Kickstart 2013 technology conference. Clearly better informed than some of his colleagues on either side of the political fence, Turnbull articulated his points well and gave as good as he got when it came to sparring with journalists.

Communication spokesman Malcolm Turnbull says new houses are being left behind by slow NBN rollout.

One point that Turnbull kept coming back to was that Labor's Fibre to the Premises plan is hell-bent on running fibre into almost every nook and cranny of the country, whereas the Coalition wants to undertake a full cost-benefit analysis before deciding which technologies are best for each area.

From a financial perspective it's hard to argue against the idea of performing a cost-benefit analysis on any IT project, let alone something of this significance. Yet from a technological perspective, as soon as you start cutting corners on a national fibre network you risk propagating the patchwork coverage problems which created the need for the NBN in the first place. For example people stuck on slow copper in HFC cable areas seem like they'll be trapped in no man's land for a long time under the Coalition's plans to keep using Telstra and Optus' cable networks and focus the NBN rollout elsewhere. Metro DSL fringe dwellers are not as badly off as some people, but they're certainly not the lucky ones just because the cable runs down the next street.