Despite being announced three years ago, many Australians still have little idea what the NBN actually is. This coupled with some of the worst media coverage of anything, well, ever plus a raft of politicians and commentators saying things about it which are disingenuous or simply not true has led to the primary discussion surrounding it focusing on who said what. Today we're ignoring the politics and reviewing the NBN as though it were a new television or a phone: rating it according to performance, features and value.

If you hold the common misconception that the NBN is simply an expensive way of accessing web pages and YouTube videos faster, then this is the article for you. We'll deal with the general benefits of super-fast broadband, the technologies that deliver it and the cost of delivery. There's also a lengthy section addressing common criticisms and alternatives that you can gloss over or skip to as desired.

What is the National Broadband Network

The NBN is an infrastructure which provides the vast majority of Australians with super-fast, ubiquitous, future-proof broadband coverage which brings with it vast benefits to business, existing infrastructure and society in general.

It will cost $38bn with $27bn of that being a tax payer investment (i.e. the tax payers will get that money back) with the rest coming from private investors.

At its simplest, NBN replaces Australia's copper network with fibre optic cable. There are a few reasons for doing this:

The current copper network is old and rotting. The vast performance benefits of fibre cater for the massive increase in broadband traffic that will outstrip the performance limitations of copper and wireless within the next several years whilst also providing a future-proofed infrastructure which will last in to the next century. It is also far more resilient and chemically stable than copper and costs a fraction to power and maintain. This has made it the obvious choice for copper replacement the world over. Replacing copper with fibre brings with it wide-reaching social benefits and huge efficiencies to existing infrastructures (health, education, power distribution etc) plus enormous potential for businesses of all sizes. The current copper network is overwhelmingly owned by Telstra (which is a competitor to the industry it supplies copper to) and this has created a monopoly. NBN Co (the government-owned company that will roll-out the fibre) will not compete with its customers: the carriers and ISPs that it will supply. This would resolve a long-standing problem with the structure of Australia's telecommunications industry. All retailers should, in theory, have a level playing field.

Performance

There are three flavours of NBN. 93 per cent of Australian premises will be connected with fibre while more-rural and truly-remote locations will be serviced by fixed wireless and satellite connections. We'll deal with each separately.

1. Fibre optic

In terms of raw speed there's no other choice. Off the bat it offers fast upload and download speeds at 100 Megabits per second (Mb/s) in each direction and can easily be upgraded to 1Gb/s (10x faster) just by upgrading the electronics at either end of the line. Last year, scientists managed to transmit at speeds of 26 Terabits per second (that's a geeky way of saying unbelievably fast) using fibre.

Fibre also offers low latency across vast distances and a very reliable connection. Primary broadband functions such as video conferencing and advanced cloud technologies ideally require sub 50ms connection delays. Beyond fibre, only the very best copper networks can manage this.

The good news doesn't stop there. Fibre is also far more resilient than copper, which is prone to oxidization and general rot to a large extent. Indeed, it currently costs at least $1bn every year to maintain the current copper network.

Fibre maxes out advanced-aging tests (60 years plus) and has survived intact in harsh temperature fluctuations and real world physical abuse like mudslides with aplomb.

Two other benefits are energy consumption and "attenuation". In order to force data signals through copper, vast amounts of electricity are required. The signal strength also drops off rapidly (attenuates) meaning that high ADSL speeds on copper are only available up to a few kilometres from an exchange. This drops to just 600m using VDSL (and that's if you live in an area with an idyllic, new, high-quality copper cabling infrastructure). In reality, old, damaged rotten copper decimates performance. By comparison fibre travels without noticeable signal degradation over tens of kilometres at a time using a fraction of the power.

With bandwidth and capacity so vastly ahead of copper, limits on data usage evaporate. Ultimately, a fibre connection must score top marks for its future-proof performance and is the gold standard for any broadband infrastructure.

2. Fixed wireless

Outside of metropolitan areas (that aren't too remote) premises will be connected using 4G-like fixed wireless connections. This is akin to having each house in a spread-out 'town' being connected to the NBN via a mobile phone mast. However, they're more reliable and efficient because the two wireless end-points point directly at each other - a "wireless wire" if you will.

In performance terms, this provides ADSL-like upload and download speeds (initially 12Mb/s download and 1Mb/s upload) though this will move up to 25Mb/s download and 5Mb/s upload down the line. This should be enough for most of the imminent applications and features. There shouldn't be issues with interference from other premises as premises will be spread out. However, with data consumption continuing to explode in the coming decade, it will likely feel constrictive down the line. More importantly, however, rural dwellers have the most to gain through the massive boosts in healthcare, education, business (and their social lives in general) that is afforded by fast, high-bandwidth, reliable, low-latency broadband. Wireless struggles to offer this.

Less bandwidth and tighter limits on data usage mean it's very much a second-rate connection method. We'll deal with the issues of fixed wireless in the NBN criticisms section below. For now though, the fact that fixed wireless is only being deployed for half-baked accounting reasons means the overall performance score drops two points.

Satellite

Remote dwellings, which only get access to satellite NBN, may well be left dreaming about fixed wireless access as satellite will only allow speeds of 6Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up (this will move to 12Mb/s down and 1Mb/s long-term). It's very much the third-rate choice of connection. Data usage is relatively restrictive and plans more expensive - but they are affordable.

Even so, it may well be an improvement on what's available now. Many of the remotest communities in Australia don't have a fixed line today. They get telephone lines through long-distance radio connections or they already use satellites for everything.

For those who couldn't dream of having broadband before, or those who don't actually have a fixed dwelling or who are based at sea, the NBN's satellite connection will provide revolutionary social, business and scientific opportunities. Being able to access basic broadband speeds in the middle of the outback or on the Great Barrier Reef, will provide all manner of monitoring and communication opportunities that never existed before (mentioned below). As such, satellite NBN is generally a big win albeit with a big asterisk next to it.

Performance score: 8/10

Features and applications

The following might sound like a glowing endorsement of a particular government policy but it's more a description of what ubiquitous super-fast broadband provides in principle. The network requirements are high download AND upload speeds, plus very low (ideally sub 50ms) latency, and high reliability regardless of the technology used.

That's according to people like the administrators of Australia's leading Telehealth department based at Melbourne's Alfred Hospital, and Cisco's top analyst, Dr Robert Pepper who advises governments and telcos around the world on current and future infrastructure requirements (and has sat on America's FCC and the UK's OFCOM), amongst many others. The following can all be achieved on fibre and very-high quality, short lengths of copper. There are questions regarding the reliability and latency of wireless connections in some instances.

Healthcare

Super-fast broadband will revolutionise healthcare for everyone, especially the elderly and those living in rural areas. In doing so it will save so much money from Australia's annual $120bn (and rising) health spending that it will pay for the entire build on its own. Primary benefits involve Telehealth - the ability to have HD video conversations with a doctor (or even world-leading specialist) just by talking to a computer or TV screen.

This provides instant triage, improves efficiency, saves time and money, has emptied waiting rooms in trials and ultimately provides quicker and more-efficient care to everybody. It also negates the need for many doctor visits and ambulance journeys (which can cost several thousand dollars per trip). It also allows many hospital bed-ridden patients to be monitored remotely and automatically which saves hospitals vast sums of money (around $1000 per patient per night). Furthermore, patients get better quicker and space in hospitals is made available more quickly for those who need it.

Seniors can avoid expensive care facilities for longer if their health, appearance, and mobility can be remotely monitored. It's even possible to monitor degenerative conditions by automatically checking things like movement range - an important issue as "Boomers" start hitting retirement age in large numbers. Niche features like this can also bite chunks out of the annual $500,000,000 cost of Seniors having falls.

Add extended benefits like not having to take time off work to get yourself (or a sick child) checked out by a GP and the savings to the economy and productivity are enormous. There are very many more health applications in existence and many more in development. The cost savings and efficiency boosts are in the billions making it worth the health service building the NBN on its own - in some places it's already started to do so. Talking to the national leaders in Telehealth, based at The Alfred, the prime requirements are for bandwidth (including upload speeds), latency and reliability.

Telepresence

Telepresence allows people to appear in meetings on screen, life size, in Full High Definition and lag free. It's already being used by some government and business leaders but with everyone attached to fast internet the savings become higher.

Panasonic Australia is one company that's embraced it. Executives no longer need to travel to Japan for regular meetings with head office, which saves the company a fortune. It also means workers don't have to be away from their families, stay out of the office for days at a time and it dramatically reduces travel weariness.

Last year a limited government trial found the same thing. Government Telepresence meetings meant public servants didn't have to travel to Canberra for days at a time for single meetings. The initial trial saw $12,000,000 saved in 1031 meetings in travel costs in one year. One meeting, connecting 12 different locations, saw $100,600 saved in travel costs alone.

The potential for telepresence and telecommuting at all levels of society is huge. An increasing number of people won't have to commute to work again. Many won't have to live in cities and can live in their favourite parts of the country - parts where the local economy, for instance, is tourism-based like the Sunshine Coast. The knock-on effects for regional development and metropolitan traffic (and also the environment) are significant.

Power distribution and the Smart Grid

Cities with fibre networks have found that the ability to micromanage power distribution has led to massive savings through efficiency and peak-power reduction. Little work on this has been published in Australia but the potential for power saving at distributor and customer levels is very high - worth thinking about for both power bills and environmental levels. There are also potential benefits for power routing during disaster periods and a reduction in outages. Read more here.

Education

Education is revolutionised across the board but especially for rural dwellers. We're already seeing Australian classes interact with counterparts in Japan in live feeds. However, the potential is vast - particularly the thought of the School of The Air (and anyone else in the country for that matter) being replaced by interactive online classes plus the ability to take degrees from the likes of MIT and Harvard in the US while out on the farm.

A recent report also highlighted the huge benefits of broadband to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

In terms of money, efficiency boosts and centralisation of services are likely to save millions of dollars each year.

We'll cover this more over time.

Television

Getting access to the world's TV channels will not be a big thing to many people, however, to rural dwellers who struggle just to access our Free To Air channels, having access to HD TV and world-leading Video on Demand services from all over the planet will be transformative. The potential for TV subscription (and video on demand) business is very high.

Another consideration is that Ultra High Definition 4K TVs will be on sale in Australia by the end of the year. The only way to distribute a full resolution signal to them is with fibre (you can't broadcast the signal using other means). The importance of Television to Australian households will vary from person to person. However, it's worth noting that 4K (and possibly even 8K TVs) will be normal in Australia in the next two decades and that only fibre can hope to cope with the bandwidth required to transmit the signal. The question as to the importance of catering for media consumption in future infrastructure requirements is up for debate but it's worth remembering that the average Australian watches two hours of television per day, has at least two TVs in a house and many are already very used to recording multiple channels while watching something else.

Telephone

Paying for line rental and landline phone calls will be a thing of the past - all of this can be catered for by one's broadband subscription. This will save varying amounts of money depending on landline usage but, generally speaking, wave goodbye to your phone bill.

An illustrative example

For those who struggle to visualise new and futuristic tech-based claims like the above, an idealised but realistic example would be as follows. Picture a rural farmhouse where the dad is playing online poker with his mates hundreds of kilometres away on the big screen and talking to them like they were in the same room, while the mother has a full high definition video call with a child travelling in Europe (for free). At the same time another child is interacting with her professor at an American university, while her younger brother watches movies on demand and plays games with his online mates in the other room. An, er, visiting cousin goes through the accounts of a client in Perth live onscreen as part of his accountancy business. Meanwhile, granny is asleep in her bed after recovering from a fall which sees her vital signs being monitored, hundreds of kilometres away, for any significant changes. In that one scenario the great Australian tyranny of distance is decimated, standard life is transformed across the board and the traditional costs of doing everything are slashed.

The future, now

There are many futuristic applications on the horizon like 3D printing which are shaping up to be revolutionary - the idea of sending physical objects over the internet might sound like Star Trek but it's already happening. While printing a gun might sound worrying, this recent landmark achievement illustrates the potential of a nascent industry which commentators are describing as potentially as revolutionary as the steam train.

Another concept is the "Internet of Things" whereby everything communicates with everything else. A localised version is already happening in NBN-ready Tasmania where "Sense-T" initiatives are allowing farmers to monitor crops like never before.

However, the general consensus from the techies is that we have little idea what we'll be using the internet for in 20 years' time as the applications haven't been invented yet.

Business

Putting a price on the business benefits is tricky, but we do know the numbers can be huge. A fairly exhaustive Cost Benefit Analysis attempt was created in Japan which, despite being utterly different in so many ways, did manage to come up with a figure that equates to around $200bn over a decade. That study estimated that telecoms companies would see 45 per cent of the economic boost while other industries would get the remaining 55 per cent.

Australia's tyranny of distance exaggerates Japan's benefits considerably.

Being the backbone of how most business is conducted suggests a very high figure. IBM recently put it at $1 trillion over the next four decades. Last year a Deloitte study stated that the digital economy will increase from $50bn to $70bn per year in the next five years due to expectations from the NBN. Also a Nielsen study found that 93 per cent "of Australian businesses believe that participation in the digital economy is important to their ongoing business strategy" and 75 per cent said "National broadband infrastructure will increase their ability to engage in the digital economy."

Another significant boost from a business point of view is the breaking of the Telstra monopoly. Businesses across the country will be able to offer services on the network on a level playing field affording great innovation opportunities and competition levels which will ensure prices are low and innovation high.

Wireless broadband boosts

The massive increase in mobile internet traffic over the next several years means that the airwaves will get congested and that data will increasingly need to be "offloaded" onto nearby fibre networks via WiFi to avoid blockages. More on this here.

Ultimately, there's something for everyone provided by ubiquitous, fast broadband with people benefitting to varying degrees depending on where they are and what they're used to. All of the above is already happening around the world (and in Australia to some degree) and we'll continue to cover the applications as they emerge, develop and evolve.

Features and Applications score: 10/10

Value

Firstly, the business model of the NBN demands it pay for itself through subscriptions. According to the Implementation Study, when it is sold 15 years after completion, it will go for five-to-eight per cent profit meaning the net cost of the roll out is less than zero to begin with.

However, the NBN will also improve existing infrastructure (particularly health and power distribution) efficiencies to the point where the savings will pay for the entire rollout on their own.

Thirdly, the business and innovation opportunities (repeatedly reported as being billions and trillions of dollars over the coming decades) afforded by the platform and infrastructure will dwarf the initial build costs.

A Cost Benefit Analysis would help clarify numbers but is huge undertaking. Ultimately, however, what's the point? By every measure related to the operating model, efficiency gains and business benefits you can easily justify the $40bn investment over the coming twenty years (and probably much quicker) even if you use cynically-negative assumptions.

As a value proposition, this makes for a trifecta of win.

If future-oriented industries, technologies and markets are too hard to visualise, look at recent history. Telstra was sold for $60bn and it was primarily a telephone company - with a last-generation infrastructure. The NBN acts as a backbone to health, education and power infrastructures, while affording Australian businesses a world-leading infrastructure to innovate with and conduct business upon and will also be the main method of media distribution, communications (internet and telephone) in addition to providing vast social benefits and applications that we haven't actually thought of yet. Predicting a sale value is near impossible without a formal Cost Benefit Analysis as a guide. If you want to have a go, leave your thoughts in the comments.

Potential criticisms and alternatives

It's hard to find valid criticisms of the NBN that actually stand up to scrutiny, but that hasn't stopped people from making them up. Let's examine the most common recurring ones.

Wireless technologies undermine it. Utter nonsense. The reasons have been described in great detail on many technology sites, many times over the past two years. There are many factors but ultimately, the laws of physics are to blame. Wireless technologies represent ways of connecting to the wired network, wirelessly. They complement it, they do not compete with it.

Future technologies render it irrelevant. Nonsense. The current record for speeds across fibre is a whopping 26Tb/s and likely to rise. There's literally nothing on the horizon that suggests fibre might be replaced in the foreseeable future.

People hate wireless towers. Arguably the number one problem with the NBN is the use of fixed wireless. Towns hate the masts and have already banned them in places for aesthetic and perceived-health fears. The concerns over fixed wireless performance and reliability seem to be escalating constantly.

It begs the question, if we could get copper to some of these places almost a century ago, why can't we get fibre there now?

The official reasoning is that the Implementation Study regards the very high cost of connecting remote, isolated dwellings as prohibitive in the current business model: the metropolitan cross-subsidy can't be extended far enough to connect everybody. Spending money for the social benefits alone hasn't been entertained. However, a Cost Benefit Analysis may well discover that associated benefits of rural fibre connections (for example health savings like not having to make expensive ambulance runs plus Hospital At Home efficiencies) may make the relatively-high cost of fibre connection worthwhile. We'll investigate this more down the line.

The market should compete to build it, not the government. More idealistic arguments initially appear to have legs, but these too wither under scrutiny. The best attempt yet is to say that a government shouldn't have to pay for such a thing. However, historically there has been no commercial market to build it (see 4 Corners) and the potential market players (including Telstra) have all said there's no market. Furthermore, in the UK recently a market-incentive scheme failed miserably after two years where every non-incumbent competitor dropped out of the running because there was little benefit to the companies involved. The point has become somewhat idealistic: as witnessed in the likes of the USA, UK and New Zealand, incumbent ISPs end up with monopolies and local micro-monopolies and overcharge customers for mediocre services with corporate revenues being the only winner. The head of BT , the House of Lords and recently the Head of New Zealand's infrastructure all lamented not rolling out Fibre to the Home with the former saying that Fibre to the Node-style broadband is "one of the biggest mistakes humanity has made". Finding any examples of commercial players (especially Telstra) creating something for social benefit without government intervention is also problematic.

Those who despise socialism-like government spending, on principle and to a zealot-like degree, can console themselves that what will be left, once the government has left the party, is a level playing field that offers dream-like levels of competition which will allow small and large business entities alike to compete for business, innovate and provide services that ensure consumers are offered choice and price competition like never before (imagine there was one mobile phone network in Australia and choosing who to go with revolved around price and services and not the coverage foibles of your particular area). This perhaps explains why just about every Australian technology company, telco and ISP fully supports the NBN. You can read more on this, here.

It takes too long to replace all the copper. There's no technical argument against this as every individual will have a different level of impatience. The timeframe argument has recently condensed into a "it's better to implement a lesser solution now (which will still need to be replaced) that relies upon using some existing infrastructure and which offers potentially faster-than-current speeds (but no future proofing), than to build a whole new network from scratch." However, this is best discussed when a fully-formed alternative is on the table. In the meantime, if this is a concern, it's worth reading about Cisco's projections for continued skyrocketing growth of data requirements and speeds on both wired and wireless networks and how the existing copper and wireless infrastructure will be physically struggling with congestion in as little as four years. It's also worth noting that the Harbour Bridge took eight years to build with 11 years of planning before that. The Snowy Mountain Hydro Scheme took 25 years to build. The Sydney Opera House took 14 years to complete. In this light, it's tricky to validate complaints that the NBN will take too long to build especially as ever-more people will be connected throughout the ten year build - we won't all have to wait until it's finished. How long should it take to replace the old copper network? Is not replacing it at all because it 'will take too long' a valid reason for scrapping the whole project?

The costs will blow out: Tricky to predict for certain. Fanciful numbers have been bandied about stating $50bn to even $100bn with no justification given. The initial stated cost was $42.8bn. Three years on and after the latest 'blowout' it currently stands at $38bn(!) Roll out efficiency may improve over time. Unforseen cost blowouts may appear. Take your pick. Even if it did hit $50bn, it would still easily score top marks for value.

The money could be spent on other things like roads: This one appears a lot and simply isn't true. The NBN represents an investment of public money which it will get back. This isn't money that could ever be spent on anything else. Fortunately, it appears that this message is finally getting through.

Fibre to the Node does the same thing faster and cheaper. The one technology which exists and could theoretically provide super-fast broadband to the nation (including upload speeds) is Fibre to the Node-based VDSL. That is investigated here. While technically feasible, there are an enormous number of questions and challenges to do with copper-network condition, competition, governance and funding, which can only be speculated upon without an incredibly-detailed implementation study and Cost Benefit Analysis.

Any notion that a build would be quicker should also be viewed cautiously. A FTTN network would still require an enormous amount of planning, as well as supremely-complex negotiating, governance and legacy infrastructure issues. It's unlikely to be cheaper owing to costs relating to using Telstra's existing network and the maintenance of it. This Citigroup Telstra-share-rating report deals with some of the realities of switching to Fibre to the Node. Of particular note is the section titled "Significant Hurdles" on page 8. The casual summary of the astronomical costs of implementing Fibre to the Node, plus the political ramifications and challenges (and even impossibilities) are in equal parts entertaining and troubling.

There's also the raw issue of lining the country's streets with fridge-sized cabinets on nature strips - it will be interesting to see how the public reacts to that one.

Between 50,000 and 70,000 of these cabinets would need to be built (each with eight large backup batteries within) upon the nation's nature strips. That could mean negotiating with every single local council planning department in the country for every single one. That would be problematic considering how some councils have thus far have been unsympathetic to accepting solitary wireless towers.

There's also the issue of whether VDSL will work at the supposed speeds of 80Mb/s downstream and 20Mb/s upstream as stated. Old and rotting copper will decimate any such speeds - some people can't make a phone call when it rains such is the state of parts of the network. Then there are questions regarding the practicality of auditing every strand of 'last-mile' copper in the country prior to roll-out or building the system anyway and replacing rotten copper as needed. If that was the case would it mean replacing hopelessly-corroded copper with fibre or more copper? The latter would be ridiculous.

As for who would own the cables inside them is another headache. Telstra's old FttN implementation study says of sharing access with competitors, "in practice it would be a disaster for customers" for many reasons (slide 14). And that's without establishing how to get Telstra to part with its copper cable in the first place. Citigroup states that reinstalling a Telstra monopoly would set industry-reform back three years.

Then there's the issue of reinstating Telstra as a monopoly player in the market, which NBN Co has just, to the great relief of the entire Australian telecoms industry, managed to structurally separate. Relying on Telstra's existing infrastructure won't come cheap in terms of maintaining it (currently the costs exceed $1bn per year) or through convincing Telstra to let the government use it - Citigroup suggests it would cost $16.3bn but with limited return on investment (the copper network is already an expired asset that is in the process of being dumped on the scrapheap). That could make VDSL significantly more expensive than the existing plans and is a major reason why detailed figures and plans are needed to justify such a course of action.

There is the question of power consumption. VDSL uses twice as much power compared to fibre. According to Rod Tucker at the University of Melbourne, Fibre to the Premises connections require 7-8 Watts per user to deliver 100Mb/s services. Fibre to the Node requires around 15W per user.

Apparently, that is enough to require two-or-three new power stations being built.

The reliability issues associated with VDSL cabinets was one reason a former BT Chief Technology Officer publicly stated that fibre to the node-style broadband is "one of the biggest mistakes humanity has made", imposing huge bandwidth and unreliability problems on those who implement it, this severely diminishes the potential for telehealth benefits where reliability is often a 'must have'.

Nonetheless, if speeds can be guaranteed then the many features and applications associated with fast broadband could be achieved. It's worth remembering, however, that Cisco's top analyst has said that only the newest and best quality copper networks meet such requirements.

That the cabinets and copper will all need to be replaced within years of being built is a major reason why so many in the technology community are saying, 'Why not just do it once and do it right at less overall expense?' However, while implementation remains technically feasible, albeit incredibly complicated, it can't be written off until a detailed implementation study and Cost Benefit Analysis is provided.

Ultimately, however, any implementation would be expensive and simply delay the inevitable requirement of replacing an ageing copper infrastructure. While it may be able to match some of the most important features and applications of the NBN in the next decade or so, it brings with it all manner of issues, isn't future-proofed and will certainly need replacing at some point in the near-to-medium term. In terms of performance and value, it certainly can't compete.

Outrage, new information and updates

More than two years of covering the NBN suggests there will be those who are unhappy with any positive conclusion. But technology is blind to politics and any non-constructive technological criticism is just rhetoric - all of the above descriptions can be expanded upon considerably.

I've approached this review in a way scientific way. As facts change and new information comes to light things will be adjusted. The scope of the infrastructure is enormous however and some minor mistakes are likely but there should not be anything significantly wrong. Leave any constructive criticisms or new information below or contact me directly.

Conclusion

I've only scraped the surface of applications for the NBN. If you want any additional information regarding costs and examples (that aren't already linked to) let us know in the comments.

While it's a shame that not everyone will be getting a fibre connection to their home, hopefully, as time goes on, the value of having one will see this issue addressed by government. It's the only valid criticism of the NBN which otherwise uses the right material (fibre) to provide future-proof broadband to the country at a net cost of nothing. At the same time it will generate money through boosting business and save money in existing infrastructures through efficiency gains.

Australia's tyranny of distance will be decimated to a degree that will continue to escalate over time. The nationwide scope of the infrastructure means that the huge number of benefits aren't localised as with the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Snowy Mountains Hydro scheme. We won't all have to wait until it's finished before we can start using it too.

As infrastructure comparisons go, it's tough to see where any other builds are better - the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge might just beat it for tourism. Beyond that, however, the performance, applications and value benefits to society are unparalleled.

Ultimately, if you never look at a web page in your life, the NBN will still be one of the most important things in your world whether you know it or not.

Verdict - Future-proof high performance, revolutionary, nationwide benefits across all areas of society plus a value proposition that wins on all counts make the NBN easily the best all-round national infrastructure ever by just about every measure. Fixed wireless connections are potentially the only let down.

Performance 8*

Features & Applications 10

Value 10

Overall 9

*Two points dropped for fixed wireless

This article represents version 1.0 and was published on 18 September 2012. It will be updated as new facts come to light.