The last week and a half of the election campaign was characterised by something amazing for us geeks: Access to the internet was lodged front and centre as an election issue.

How times change. Communications Minister Richard Alston used to deride broadband internet access by labelling it as nothing more than a high-speed pornography delivery vector, and here we are, less than eight years later, and ubiquitous access to broadband is actually swinging an election.

As desperation mounted during the election campaign, Prime Minister Julia Gillard and current Communications Minister Stephen Conroy spent a Thursday morning in mid-August pushing a big blue button to officially open the Opticomm-built NBN trial network in Midway Point, Tasmania. NBNCo CEO Mike Quigley enthusiastically added to the political booster-shot by claiming that speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second will be possible.

But somehow it wasn't enough. The sales job behind the NBN was so bad that the editorial pages of some of the country's newspapers were using it as part of the reasoning behind throwing their support behind Tony Abbott.

Online, the Australian Network Operators Group (AusNOG) has hosted weeks of energised debate about whether the NBN is actually needed. You read that correctly: The Government has done such a catastrophically bad job of communicating their broadband vision that they can't even convincingly sell it to broadband ISPs.

Why is that? Ubiquitous high-speed broadband ought to be a no-brainer, especially in regional areas which have been very poorly served by virtually every type of infrastructure.

So what might a hypothetical independent MP say to the Government if he was so bold as to sit down to tell the Communications Minister how to do his job?

Firstly: cut out the hyperbole. We're all told that South Korea is "leaving us behind" in the broadband stakes, having had 100 megabit per second fibre to the home for years. But that means we know that most of the pie-in-the-sky innovative new services that NBN boosters wax lyrical about are probably hyperventilative garbage. Having had near-ubiquitous high-speed broadband for so long, the South Koreans use it in more or less the same way that we use our own internet access, only faster. It stands to reason that we'll probably use it in the same way too.

That's not to say that innovation won't happen, but let's get a grip: It's hard to believe that the NBN will transform schoolrooms given that most schools already have broadband internet access; and I'll believe that we'll all make widespread use of telemedicine as soon as malpractice laws are amended enough to make my GP feel comfortable about prescribing a glass of milk and a good lie-down without an in-person consultation.

The benefits arising from the NBN will be far more mundane. They'll be more concerned with ubiquity, not speed. They'll remove the tyranny of distance that causes people and businesses in Forbes or Hamilton to be disadvantaged against people and businesses in Melbourne and Sydney. And they'll be incremental, quietly displacing offline parts of our lives in the same way that Google has quietly displaced the White Pages.

Secondly: cut the guts out of the financial arguments. $43 billion sounds like a lot of money, but as one of my colleagues points out, it's only about twice as much as Australia is intending to spend on replacing the Collins Class submarines it bought less than 15 years ago. If the Government can run an economic stimulus programme that sees $44 billion spent in a year and project a surplus less than four years later, we should be able to spread the same amount of expenditure out over a ten year NBN build cycle without going broke. We survived the GFC, so we actually do have the money.

Thirdly: The price for access. Neither the Government nor NBNCo have yet made any statements about how much NBN broadband services are likely to cost. Indeed, Quigley's admissions in the May Senate Estimates round could be indicative of an attempt to cloud the issue. Mr. Quigley confirmed that services on the NBN trial in Tasmania are being offered to ISPs for $0 setup fee and $0 per month ongoings - meaning that retail prices offered by trial-participant ISPs will likely be something of a bait-and-switch: There will be a future day when NBNCo will increase their wholesale price. What will Tasmanian broadband prices look like then?

It's not difficult to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to work out what the access price can be. The Government has said that the entire $43 billion enterprise will be sold to private investors five years after the network is built, and those private investors will want a commercial return on their money. Picking a number out of the air, 8% of $43 billion is about $3.44 billion per annum. Divide that over the 8 million premises expected to receive an NBN service to get $430 per household per annum, or about $36 per month. That's assuming that the network costs nothing per annum to operate, never needs to be maintained, and carries no additional debt which needs to be serviced from operating income, so perhaps bump it up to $50 per month per service to be conservative (and bump it up again if take-up isn't 100%: What if commercial returns must be yielded from 4 million premises instead of 8 million?)

That doesn't sound like much, until you consider that you'll have to plug that NBN port into an ISP, and ISPs aren't free. If the port price is circa $50 per month, what's the retail cost to the consumer? $80? $100? And what about when NBNCo is privatised, and prices are dictated by a monopoly provider interested in maximising returns to its shareholders?

So this brings us to what a savvy, engaged rural independent MP is likely to care about the most: The public interest. Or, more specifically, the interest of the part of the public that votes for him.

Rural Australians have not generally been well-served by telecommunications. Broadband connectivity is usually poor, if it exists at all, and living in areas where calling the next door neighbor could very well be a timed long-distance call provides perspective that city telephone users have probably never considered.

Bob Katter has shown awareness of this, commenting that, "Telstra's privatisation was diabolical for Australia ... Clearly you can sustain those services in the cities and you can't in the country."

Katter has correctly identified the fact that privatising Telstra created a fiduciary duty for the company to act in the best interests of its shareholders, and not in the best interests of Katter's rural electorate.

Yet the Labor NBN plan proposes to repeat exactly what Katter has already suffered.

So, what to do?

I think a perspective change is necessary. The NBN isn't a bright, shiny, geeky technology project. It's an infrastructure project, like a road (or, if ex-Senator Alston prefers, a sewer).

We're used to roads being built for political purposes: Most of Highway 1 was financed out of 50 years worth of pork-barrelling, but we don't now dispute the economic benefits it delivers.

Roads are boring, mundane, ubiquitous. But they're used for all kinds of purposes their designers never intended. They enable commerce. They enable communities to stay in touch with each other. It's unthinkable for a town in even the remotest corner of the nation to go without a Government-funded road linking it to the outside world.

No matter how few vehicles traverse a road used by some outlying satellite town in the middle of nowhere, both sides of politics know that it's political suicide to question the existence of the road on financial grounds. Nobody ever demands a cost-benefit analysis for a new road, they're simply installed where they're needed as an exercise in nation building. We know that road building projects cost billions, but we as an electorate accept their necessity without any controversy.

Roads aren't expected to operate at a profit. And toll-roads aside, nobody is proposing privatising the nation's highway network.

So it must be with the NBN.

I believe the NBN should proceed as a nation-building project. Its construction costs should be accepted as the 21st century public works programme that they are, and once it's built it should be heavily subsidised to ensure that access prices for end users remain affordable.

All thought of NBNCo ever making a profit for private investors should be vanquished. Indeed, the whole enterprise should be structured so that it cannot survive without continual injection of Government equity, just like the road network.

That'll make it stable and enduring, even if a new Government comes along later with different ideological objectives. An enterprise which loses money is impossible to privatise - who'd buy it? Once 8 million voting households are connected to a subsidised NBN, no Government will ever suggest hiking literally everyone's access fees by fiddling with the subsidies, it'd be like building tollgates at the end of every voter's street. Instead of hiking prices, politicians in bush electorates will fall over themselves to pork-barrel by turning regions serviced by wireless or satellite into new city-equivalent fibre optic developments, enabling the network to get incrementally better with age.

It also has the advantage that it'll get through the Senate. The ALP clearly wants the NBN to pass, but the Greens policy is to support it as public infrastructure, and oppose its privatisation. The new independent kingmakers created by Saturday's election have all expressed a desire for governmental stability, and that means they need to be able to get legislation through. An NBN which remains permanently in public ownership ticks that box rather well.

The Government's NBN privatisation plans propose creating a Government-funded cash-cow for telco executives which will inspire us to spend the rest of our days grizzling about how expensive the internet has become.

Treating the NBN like a road will give the nation a public infrastructure asset which we can be proud of, and incorporate into the fabric of our lives.

Mark Newton has spent almost 10 years serving as a boots-on-the-ground network engineer for one of Australia's largest ISPs.