The need to address this issue is more urgent now than ever. It's not because the telcos are deliberately trying to defraud consumers. It's because the potential for consumers to be confused about what broadband performance they'll get from their NBN is only likely to increase. Some of the blame for this situation must be laid at the feet of stakeholders who have persistently politicised the NBN build and ongoing polarising media reporting around it over the last decade. Part of the problem has been that reporting on the NBN has largely fallen into the hands of technology enthusiasts turned journalists. They're naturally way ahead of the curve in broadband needs; the sorts of people that demanded millisecond network responses for online gaming and pioneered using VPNs to access legal offshore video-on-demand services. There's nothing wrong with that; it's good to have the people that best understand technology informing the public about it. However, often commentary on the NBN has fallen victim to the echo chamber within that tight community and been hermetically sealed within a bubble of political naivety. Too often that has led to unacceptably biased reporting and, in some cases, nakedly theological arguments about broadband speeds that are inappropriate within a discourse about public policy and spending.

Clearly, fibre is a superior technology to copper and the mix of access technologies that NBN Co is currently using to build the NBN. (Even the company's CEO Bill Morrow, as an engineer, says he would love to have a mandate to go all fibre). However, has there really been a sensible and sober discussion on the implications of how we should go about building the NBN and what bang we will really get for our buck? As a telecommunications and technology writer, I'm often asked for my opinion on the Labor and Coalition approaches to the NBN in social settings. It's surprising just how heated these discussions can become and, frustratingly, despite carefully treading a middle ground with lengthy explanations of my view, rarely is it understood. I'm sometimes accused of being a Luddite or, worse, of political partisanship. It's helpful to have a clear understanding of how the NBN came to be to see the problem the ACCC faces now. In November 20005, telco network equipment vendors were courting carriers with the then relatively new copper ADSL2+ broadband technology. They showed that it could give fixed-line broadband a much-needed boost in Australia. But they also made clear that ADSL slowed as copper lengths increased.

Telstra, under the leadership of CEO Sol Trujillo, and his COO, right-hand man and fellow US ex-pat Greg Winn, seemed enthusiastic about the technology. However, it hadn't explained how it was going to guarantee uniform service levels as copper lengths between homes and Telstra's exchanges varied wildly. To cut a long story short, it emerged that Telstra had proposed spending $4.7 billion to push fibre deeper into its network (primarily in metropolitan areas) to bring copper lengths down to a standard 1.1 kilometre length. In exchange, it wanted certain regulatory concessions to get a return on its investment. But the wider telco industry was riven with conflict and dissatisfaction over the way Telstra's exerted control over its exchanges and copper assets. Then communications minister Senator Stephen Conroy was faced with a difficult choice. He could make the deal with Telstra but risk the wrath of its rivals. (And Trujillo was not one of Canberra's favourite industry captains). Labor announced that it would put the NBN build out to tender. However, the terms were highly unusual; the successful bidder would win the right to build the NBN in exchange for certain regulatory terms.

Labor rejected all the bids and decided to spend over $40 billion serving FTTP to 93 per cent of premises instead. For Winn and Trujillo — who was also facing subtly racist attacks in the media — this was socialism and they soon returned to the US. The NBN's politicisation made what should have been a bi-partisan political issue an ideological battlefront and pragmatism was thrown out the window. That's not good provenance for any multi-billion dollar spending project. Every fibre builder I spoke to off-record about Labor's NBN build was able to show — with very simple calculations — that the FTTP business model would fail and that taxpayers would be left with the bill. (And that was assuming that everyone would use the NBN for net access). The point was made strikingly clear to me during a recent trip to Bomaderry on the NSW South Coast, which was one of the first regions to receive FTTP under Labor's NBN plan.

I was staying with a retired couple that had many questions about the NBN and the plan they needed. They were satisfied with copper ADSL2+ and a 50GB download quota but they knew that someone was going to come and disconnect it soon (October). The had a fibre termination box installed on their home but didn't truly understand why it was going to be so great. I took 12 steps from the box to the pit it was connected to and said "well, from here to there you might one day, get a Gbps". It was the sort of dazzling term that they would have heard spruiked in the tech press and they seemed impressed. That was until I explained that if they had a reason to do it, and it actually could run it at that speed around the clock, they would use up their current download allowance in a matter of minutes. The real speed would depend on how much their internet provider invested in capacity beyond that little pit; choosing a service would be the same but with the ability to select speed as well as their download quota.

Even if they ordered a 100Mbps service, I explained that there was no guarantee that every internet site in the world could zap data to them at that rate. And again, what about their quota? What they told me next starkly exposed the whole folly around the public discussion on the NBN. The couple started pointing to their neighbours' homes. "They're not going to use it. They're not going to use it. They're not going to use it. They don't want to use it... And so it went on for about seven houses down.

"What about across the road?" I asked. "No, she has no use for it". They said that their neighbours were happy with mobile phones and mobile broadband. How many billions was Labor planning to spend? How many billions is the Coalition spending on the MTM version? Bomaderry is a retiree area and the situation might be quite different in a more urban setting. But in urbanised areas there's already infrastructure that can be upgraded to improve speeds. (And current official government estimates show that 51 per cent of users connected to the NBN have opted for 25Mbps plans).

There's no doubt that regional areas could join the innovation push with better broadband. However, I had to stop and think about the people of Bomaderrys' real hierarchy of needs. Every dollar spent on any either variety of NBN might be taken away from the budget for building them a new hospital, aged and mental health care services, or drug and alcohol counselling (and regional Australia has a growing ice addiction problem). It's not that I think that either Labor's or the Coalition's approach to the NBN clearly trumps the other. Nor do I think that the public should be deprived of the choice for either. If we conducted a plebiscite on the NBN tomorrow and Australia opted for FTTP then, great, so be it. However, have the public really been given enough information to understand the financial and social impact of that decision? Should we really have let urban minority groups and other interested stakeholders control the discourse around broadband policy?