The idea that the planned fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) rollout of Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) may have ended up meeting its cost targets has received a high-profile endorsement from emeritus professor Rod Tucker of the University of Melbourne.

Speaking to US conference, professor Tucker said the claim in the latest strategic review that FTTP rollout ran at $AU4,300 per household had led to confusion over costs.

As already noted by Vulture South, the latest corporate plan from NBN Co, the organisation building the NBN, refactored the basis for the per-premises rollout calculation – for example adding operational expenditure to the capital cost of the rollout. Tucker highlighted duct lease payments and labour costs as being treated this way.

Professor Tucker says the $AU2,500 per FTTP connection given by NBN in its 2012 corporate plan, and $AU2,450 given in the December 2013 strategic review may well have been nearer the mark.

In a statement sent to The Reg today, professor Tucker noted that cost savings NBN Co was beginning to apply to the rollout – the result of its increasing experience in fibre network construction – were “redacted from the Strategic Review, but at a recent Senate Select Committee meeting it emerged that the redacted number … [was] about $AU2,450”.

The other reason for the high price quoted in the latest NBN Co estimates, professor Tucker told the Conference on Optical Fiber Communications in Los Angeles, is that “NBN Co has not implemented many of the cost savings methods” that the 2012 and 2013 documents identified.

“An apparent inflation of the rollout cost … is bound to cause confusion among the press and the public,” he said, highlighting an article in Fairfax endorsing the idea that the cost of FTTP doubled (we suspect it's this article by noted tech political journalist Matthew Knott).

Professor Tucker was formerly director for Melbourne University's Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society, the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications, and has worked with vendors such as HP, Agilent and at AT&T Bell Laboratories. ®