To help you answer such questions we've written a beginner's guide to the project. What is the NBN? The National Broadband Network is the ALP's promise to give fast broadband to every Australian. Labor says it will spend $37.4 billion on the network, which will involve - for the most part - replacing Australia's copper telephone lines with tubes of fibre that will run into 93 per cent of homes, schools and businesses. The remaining 7 per cent of Australians, those in remote areas, will get fixed wireless or satellite connections that are slower than fibre but much faster than what is now available in these areas.

How would it look under the Coalition? Fibre is the fastest broadband technology. Labor's Minister for Broadband, Stephen Conroy, wants to spend more than $37 billion taking fibre all the way to your home, school or business The Coalition's Malcolm Turnbull wants to spend less money than Labor - though we don't know how much yet - running fibre to cabinets that will sit on footpaths. Turnbull's version will then piggyback on Telstra's copper phone lines. In short: the Coalition says it will give every Australian access to ''fast enough'' internet sooner and cheaper, though nothing like the speeds possible under Labor's NBN. Who owns the NBN?

Labor's network is being built by NBN Co Limited, a wholly government-owned company. NBN Co then sells capacity on the network to retailers such as Telstra, Optus and iiNet. When will it be finished? Labor expects to finish the whole network by 2021. This assumes, of course, that the Coalition does not win the September election. How many people are already using the NBN? At the end of 2012, 34,500 Australian homes and businesses were using the NBN. Of these, 10,400 were connected by fibre and the rest by fixed wireless and satellite.

Is that good progress or bad? The rollout has been slower than predicted in the NBN Co's 2011-13 corporate plan - which said 116,000 premises would be using the network by June 2012. The government says it has been slower because it took nine months to negotiate its deal with Telstra in which the government will pay the telco $11 billion to shut down its copper network and hand over its customers to NBN Co. How many people could be using it? The statistic you want to look at is ''premises passed'', which means the network is installed and the NBN services can be bought from a telephone or internet service provider. By December 2012, 339,700 premises had been passed, but it has been reported that some of these buildings are not yet able to access the network.

How fast will my internet run once I get the NBN? It depends. If you're among the 93 per cent of Australians to get fibre-optic cables connected to your home, you will immediately be able to download data at speeds of up to 100 megabits a second. This is about five times faster than the fastest ADSL broadband in today's market. But the reason the techies are getting so excited about Labor's fibre-to-the-premises NBN is because the technology can be upgraded to peak speeds that will exceed one gigabit a second. If you're in the 7 per cent who live in the most remote areas, you will be able to get download speeds of 25 megabits a second, according to the government. Put simply: in a few years Australians living out in the bush will have access to faster internet access than people living in the city today have.

How do I sign up? Once your suburb has been ''passed'' by fibre, satellite or fixed wireless, you can call up whoever you buy your phone or internet from (Telstra, Optus, iiNet, et al) and ask them to put you on an NBN plan. To check whether construction has begun in your area, visit nbnco.com.au and type your address into the search box. How much will it cost? The cheapest retail plan on the market is the SkyMesh plan at $30 a month, which gives you 15GB of data. The most expensive Telstra BigPond plan is $132 a month with a data limit of 500GB.

To compare prices of NBN plans, visit the website whistleout.com.au. What happens if the Coalition wins the election? Turnbull has promised that under a Coalition government ''all Australians will have access to very fast broadband'' and he will build it ''sooner and cheaper'' than Labor. ''We would use the technologies which deliver the service levels needed at the least cost and in the shortest time,'' he says. Turnbull says his version of the NBN will use cheaper technologies than those in Labor's NBN. He favours the cheaper but slower ''fibre-to-the-node'' technology, being used in several countries, including Britain.

At the moment, fibre-to-the-node can reach speeds of about 80 megabits a second, more than adequate for existing residential requirements. (A single high definition video stream needs 6 megabits per second for example.) But Turnbull's preferred technology, while cheaper, cannot be upgraded to anything near the speeds possible with fibre-to-the-home technology. Turnbull says he will delay building a new network in suburbs that already have access to relatively fast broadband but will prioritise the areas around Australia that have the slowest internet. The Coalition has not yet said how much its network will cost. Criticisms of Coalition's NBN Labor has a fundamentally different philosophy to the Coalition.

While the Coalition wants a cost-benefit analysis to be undertaken and a network to be built cautiously and for speeds to match what people are asking for, Labor has shot way out to the moon, and sees the project as a grand nation-building thing - like the Snowy Hydro Scheme or the 21st century version of our copper telephone network. Labor says Malcolm Turnbull's NBN plan is short-sighted and akin to building a Harbour Bridge with only one lane. Loading Criticisms of Labor's NBN ''Fibre to the premises is the single most expensive means of upgrading broadband,'' Turnbull says. ''The investment in the NBN will mean that, to recoup its costs, the company will have to triple the amount it earns from every customer in Australia over the next decade. That follows a decade when consumers have been getting more while paying less and less for internet access. If we can provide Australians with very fast broadband capable of supporting applications used by consumers sooner and at a much lower cost, that will be of much greater benefit to the Australian economy.'' Follow IT Pro on Twitter