In a blog post on Wednesday morning, Morrow lays out his case for not throwing away money on capacity that nobody really wants or needs yet.

The sniping about the lack of NBN capacity came to a head last week, after NBN's half yearly results, when Morrow was asked about the paucity of our plans of "up to" 25 megabits per second speeds in comparison to the wider spread availability of 1 Gigabit per second speeds around the world.

For the uninitiated, that equates to internet speeds a theoretical 40 times faster already available elsewhere.

"1Gbps speeds are simply way beyond what even the most advanced end-user needs today, let alone what is needed by regular families across Australia," Morrow writes.

Morrow posted his blog in order to justify controversial comments made in last week's half yearly results briefing. Paul Smith

"Even in a heavy usage household right now it's likely you'd struggle to generate the need for anything close to a 1Gbps –if you had five 4K TVs streaming 4K movies simultaneously then that's only around 100Mbps being consumed – leaving 900Mbps idle."

Morrow says that in some places NBN already offers the option for its retail service providers to offer gigabit plans, but none of them are doing so because the price they would need to charge, and the lack of consumer demand makes it commercially unviable.

He says those Australians casting an envious eye overseas, are not seeing the true reality on the ground.


Sure their packages are big, but they're only using a tiny bit of them, is his message.

He says the decision taken by Google Fiber last October to put its fibre to the premise deployments on hold, in favour of other methods of ultra-fast broadband delivery, is evidence that NBN is taking the right approach.

'Could, and probably will, change'

"Google Fiber found that viable economics for Gigabit broadband simply did not exist once the initial hype of the project had faded and the product hit the streets," Morrow says.

"Ultimately even a company with a huge amount of capital available such as Google Fiber found that digging up driveways and gardens to connect every single premise to FTTP was too expensive and time consuming … quite clearly their conclusion was that the economics of delivering gigabit speeds via FTTP simply did not add up."

Morrow's assertion is that there is not a single application for the high speeds being delivered elsewhere that will make it worthwhile for Australian consumers to pay for it, and that as requirements increase, the NBN will be improved to accommodate them.

"Of course, if we were in a position to deliver 1Gbps for $49/month, as they do in Singapore, then we would do it – but we are simply not in that position from an economic point of view," he says.

"The Singaporean Next Generation National Broadband Network [NGNBN] cost only a fraction of what it will cost to build the NBN … [Also] in Hong Kong you can deliver FTTP for as low as $150 per premises – in comparison, thanks to Australia's unique geographical and population density situation, it is costing us an average of $4400 … these are the stone cold facts of the matter and there is no getting away from them."


The arguments against Morrow and the Government's approach are based around the accusation that Australia is being too short sighted and eschewing tomorrow by building only for today's demand … and they are convincing arguments.

Morrow also tries to rebut them, by repeating the mantra that the Coalition's NBN is upgradable if and when we need it.

"Of course, the demand for Gigabit speeds could, and probably will, change," he says.

"Current plans for FTTP and DOCSIS 3.1 HFC suggest they will be able to deliver such speeds to around 5 million premises on the NBN network by 2020, and the other parts of our network, with the exception of satellite, have upgrade paths to offer the same ultra-fast speeds when demand comes around."

It is that assertion that is most questionable. Sure the network may be upgradable beyond 2020, but we have absolutely no commitment from anyone in power that this will happen.

Monopoly or duopoly incumbent telcos in Australia, have a track record of wringing every last drop out of their infrastructure before upgrading, its hard to see this changing once the NBN is built.

As Morrow goes on to point out in his blog "For a variety of reasons, our broadband upgrade in Australia started much later [than Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan], so we cannot judge ourselves against markets like these."

The reason of course being that the likes of Telstra and Optus were sweating their assets.

So as well as not having to worry about our smaller broadband packages, we are also being told to take comfort in the knowledge that we are just late developers … it remains to be seen whether Australians agree.