The minister will be surprised mainly because he is simply doing and saying the same thing that the Coalition has been presenting (to generally good press reception) since it took office from the last Labor government.

The minister has stuck rigidly to the line that the problem most Australians had with Labor's "gold-plated" fibre to the home plan was that it was taking too long.

Under the Coalition's cheaper fibre to the node plan, he maintains that Australians will be connected years faster and without the waste of money (cue party poppers).

Nature of complaints

The problem is that now the previously ill-informed or disinterested public are seeing the NBN in their own streets instead of in headlines that they flick past, they aren't happy with what we have collectively signed up for.

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy announced a preferable NBN, but shackled it to an unrealistic promise of commercial returns. Glen McCurtayne

Complaints can be split largely into three camps … those that have been connected and are realising that the experience is largely similar or even worse than what they already had (when's the brave new future coming?!); those that have been connected and had it messed up by NBN, their internet service provider or both (can I have my old internet switched back on please?); and those that are still waiting for any sign that the NBN is coming to them and are feeling increasingly like they are stood in an endless queue at a food stand, where they can already see people ahead of them spitting the food in the bin.

There are many reasons why the NBN has been a troubled project for both political parties since its inception, and the main one is that it was a political football from day one, where every problem was seized upon as evidence of the folly of the idea.


From a practical perspective the issue has always been that it is simply a big undertaking. There are a range of potential excuses for any individual problems that arise and the general public are largely (justifiably) ignorant to what is happening on the other side of their buffering computer and TV screen.

This is not a simple case of the Coalition picking the wrong technology to base the rollout on (although it did), this is a case of a hugely complex and time-consuming initiative proving to be hugely complex and time-consuming.

Superloop's Bevan Slattery says the NBN must be brought 'on budget' by the government in order to allow it to be competitive in the market. David Rowe

Those that leapt all over the Labor government for the problems with the rollout of its technically superior version of a broadband network are seeing that there are also problems with the compromised version of the NBN that they demanded we adopt.

NBN CEO Bill Morrow gets called all the names under the sun by Twitter warriors, but he is no fool. He is simply prosecuting a defined strategy pretty effectively.

Internet service providers are also being rightfully raked over the coals for misleading download speed advertising, but they are also generally trying to offer the fastest packages they can afford to, under the CVC price regime that NBN has to charge in order to make ends meet.

Reality of flawed policy

We are finally seeing the reality of a flawed policy being realised, with the frustrating thing being that there has been no shortage of people pointing out that it was flawed to begin with.


Many of those that clapped along as Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott announced a scaled down NBN are now complaining about the results. Angus Mordant

One of the country's most knowledgeable internet entrepreneurs Bevan Slattery has already told the government that, in order to get the job done properly, they must stop forcing NBN to make a commercial return. That way NBN could stop charging ISPs so much and make higher speeds more affordable.

However, there is way too much political water under the bridge to make that a feasible move for either party, because whichever treasurer or finance minister puts the NBN on the books will have big deficit numbers to explain to a population that doesn't understand enough not to simply blame the government of the day.

So we are stuck with the situation we have today ... great isn't it?

Of course plenty of the people who are now complaining voted for the government to be doing exactly what it is doing, and probably tut-tutted along as shock jocks spoke about Labor's "white elephant" NBN.

NBN's current stats apparently show that only one in 10 installations go awry, but those kind of figures don't do anything to appease an underwhelmed and covetous nation, full of people that see first hand how much better things can be whenever they travel overseas.

The ironic thing is that Labor's initial NBN plan was electorally popular, so they could feasibly have sold it as a necessary infrastructure investment in the nation's future, without all the ROI nonsense to begin with … its not like the promised national surplus arrived anyway.

Malcolm Turnbull could then have simply promised to sharpen up the rollout and taken credit for doing so.


We'd still have had problems and point scoring no doubt, but at least it would be a rocky road that was heading somewhere exciting.

Instead we are where we are, spending billions to upgrade things for some people, while keeping lots of us on an even keel and watching on as we continue to fall behind others elsewhere in the world.

It's a long way from the exciting prospect the NBN once seemed to be.

Paul Smith is the Financial Review's technology editor.