Crowdsourcing has been a integral part of this article. Add your views and experiences to the discussion.

This article continues on from part one, which can be found, here.

Different Timescale

The bulk of the current NBN is scheduled to finish in 2021. Thus far it's on track but we'll know much more in the next few months.

The Coalition says it will complete its rollout much quicker. This appears to be based upon timeframes seen in countries like the UK where the process for upgrading to VDSL basically involves adding FttN cabinets to the street. In a standing start, this is definitely the faster option (ar least for suitable areas). But in Australia, and with several years already passed, the race is not nearly so simple: NBNco has a big head start and the Coaltion has much-bigger and unpredictable hurdles (see The Viability) to navigate.

Furthermore, as Richard Chirgwin points out:

"Since 2009, BT has rolled out FttN (in BT parlance, fibre-to-the-cabinet) services in 1376 exchange areas. At around 340 exchange areas per year, it would take eight years for Australia to put VDSL2 into all the areas now covered by ADSL2+."

(In the linked article, Chirgwin also points out that the UK is not ahead of us and that it's slow-starting rollout, is also scheduled to ramp up quickly.)

The government and NBNco has spent years planning the rollout, negotiating with the incumbents, negotiating with contractors and building trial sites.

If elected later this year, what's the earliest the Coalition could start building? Let's be optimistic and say 2015. How long to build FttN in ideal circumstances? The number that gets bandied about is five years (although, as Chirgwin says above, it's lilkely eight). Straight away, that puts the finish date at 2020. Is that really significantly quicker? Is 2019 or 2018 'much quicker' for that matter? These are incredibly-optimistic figures.

At present, and without a very detailed implementation study it's frankly impossible to see how the Coalition could implement its policy significantly quicker than the current plans. According to the facts and available information, it could just as easily take much longer.

The legacy

A traditional justification of spending billions on national infrastructure is that it lasts for generations. Australia has many prominent examples including The Overland Telegraph, The Snowy Mountains Scheme, The Sydney Harbour Bridge, all of which got panned by public and politicians at the time and all of which are still famous around the world. All of them were built with an eye on future requirements.

Australia will be the first country in the world to have ubiquitous Fibre-to-the-Premises, we already know what many of the revolutionary benefits will be and we know it will operate happily up to the next century.

In contrast the Coalition's alternative already needs to have its subsequent upgrade factored into its building plans. We also know that data requirements and speed will outstrip its capabilities by 2017 (see below) - when it might not have even started to be built yet (see The Viability).

Sydney's Harbour Bridge only needed one lane when it was built. Now, after being assisted by the Harbour Tunnel there is talk of adding extra layers to boost capacity. It's unlikely that even the visionaries predicted that. However, the data forecasts for global broadband are clear - broadband requirements will outstrip the performance of copper-based solutions within the next several years. We're already being held back by the copper-based constraints.

It raises the question that if the Coalition wants to build a network for Australians that is "sufficient for their needs" which needs are those? The ones of the general public in 2013 or of the nation in 2020?



Source: Cisco VNI

According to Cisco's world-leading VNI index (which is what governments and businesses around the world use to base infrastructure decisions upon), the amount of data moving over the internet has doubled since 2011. It will double again well before 2020. The trend is for it to keep rising.

The level of growth has driven discussion about the internet reaching its limits and how only fibre deployment can stop that happening.

This raises the following questions; are Cisco's forecasts wrong? Should expensive new infrastructure last generations? The Coalition's plans are to spend $20bn-to-$40bn of tax payer's money on infrastructure that can barely cope with today's requirements and certainly won't in the next several years.

The following graph was put forward by members of Australia's technology community to illustrate the long term, future-proof benefit of choosing fibre now.



In 10-to-20 years' time what will we think when looking at this graph? Source: Cabidas

Ultimately, the Coalition has only mentioned current needs. It needs to address the specifics of Australia's future requirements and the compatibility of its policies with Cisco's world-leading VNI forecast.

Other countries

It's fair to say that the Coalition is basing most, if not all, of its policy based on rollouts in other countries. We've demonstrated why Australia is largely incomparable above. Nonetheless, Malcolm Turnbull has criticized the ABC for not examining what's happening overseas.

In truth, we have been. The problem is: finding relevant positive role-models is challenging. The broad situations in countries like the USA (interesting, slightly-related-to-Australia debate, here) and Canada are only good if you like the thought of monopolies and duopolies exploiting the public by offering inferior services at inflated prices. Canada is stuck with some of the worst data charges in the Western World. The corporate and patchwork nature of America means most people rail against internet access. A few hot spots, like Seattle, Kansas City (and here), and

Chattanooga (see also here and here), which are independently-deploying NBN-like FttP, are seeing enormous benefits from doing so. The US government is pushing for fibre across the whole country.

Also note, an Atlanta city rival recently said, "Having a fiber-optic broadband system like Chattanooga's in 2013 is like having an airport like ours was in 1963."

But the main issue is that every country in the world is moving to fibre and it's not hard to find political leaders in each and every country saying why - Angela Merkel, at last year's CeBit exhibition (the largest tech show in the world) said in her keynote that fibre was the future. This was echoed by the conference partner, Brazil, through President Dilma Rousseff. (Incidentally 2013's theme is "Shareconomy" based upon the cloud.)

Indeed, countries moving to fibre include Israel, China, America, France, Korea, Singapore, UAE and Korea.

Japan is too, but the Japanese cultural attitude to infrastructure construction makes it incomparable to other countries - they build things for the future and barely think twice about the cost. It already had one of the best copper networks on the planet.

There's a full list here.

But we'll focus on two that are particularly-relevant just briefly(ish). The Coalition constantly refers to the UK as a model for its alternative deployment. The UK's broadband policies have led to wildly-varying services. FttN works quite well in a limited number of areas. However, the underlying policy of getting a downright-laughable minimum 2Mb/s connection to the whole country has spent years of failing very hard.

Nonetheless, fibre is appearing from some providers.

Having recently returned from spending three weeks there, a common theme was to get fibre to avoid being left behind by the French. The overriding problem they have, however, is a total lack of money, (they're facing a triple-dip recession). Some comments are telling, none more so than from the country's Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt.

From Delimiter:

"[He] said the impact of the Internet on modern economies was "now well-documented by a number of studies", accounting for a major proportion of growth in gross domestic product... "My nightmare is that when it comes to broadband we could make the same mistake as we made with high speed rail. When our high speed rail network opens from London to Birmingham in 2026 it will be 45 years after the French opened theirs, and 62 years after the Japanese opened theirs. Just think how much our economy has been held back by lower productivity for over half a century. We must not make the same short-sighted mistake..." "We simply will not have a competitive broadband network unless we recognise the massive growth in demand for higher and higher speeds," he said. Consequently, Hunt said he viewed fibre to the node/cabinet as only a short to medium term solution, referring to an earlier report by the UK's House of Lords into the matter. "Whilst I am talking about the House of Lords report, let me address a further misunderstanding," he said. "They suggest that fibre to the cabinet is the sum of the government's ambitions. They are wrong. Where fibre to the cabinet is the chosen solution it is most likely to be a temporary stepping stone to fibre to the home - indeed by 2016 fibre to the home will be available on demand to over two thirds of the population."

The House of Lords report said that broadband was a, "fundamental strategic asset."

Meanwhile, BT's former CTO said;

"Fibre to the cabinet is one of the biggest mistakes humanity has made," he said. "It ties a knot in the cable in terms of bandwidth and imposes huge unreliability risks... It is a shame... "What are the leaders doing? There is Sweden in greater Europe, and in the Far East you have Korea, Japan and China. They have a minimum level of 100 Mbps. That is where they start," Cochrane said. "They are rolling out 1Gbps, but they are planning for the next phase of 10Gbps. To return to an earlier point, if you have got fibre to the cabinet and you are relying on copper, I can tell you that the network is going to collapse on copper when you get to 1Gbps. It will collapse much earlier."

There's more glowing praise and comparisons here plus some more recent developments, here and here.

Some have noted how the UK squandered its Natural resources (North Sea Oil) wealth without investing it for the future. Could that be a warning to Australia?

Meanwhile, in New Zealand...

New Zealand is probably the most relevant example. The Coalition used to cite New Zealand as an example for broadband implementation. This seems to have died down since New Zealand started copying Australia's NBN.

Of particular interest is that while no Cost Benefit Analysis has been performed for Australia, it has for New Zealand. Interestingly, the associated pecuniary benefits of New Zealand's benefits are so high that they would pay for Australia's NBN. That's impressive for a country whose GDP is almost 90 per cent smaller than Australia's. One wonders, what would the benefits to Australia amount to?

"[The report] uses a 'grass-roots' analysis to quantify the likely end-user economic benefits, called consumer surplus gains by economists, of a sample of high-speed broadband applications across the healthcare, education, business and agriculture sectors. The broadband applications considered include online doctor consultations, remote learning, teleworking and online farm management tools among a number of others. It calculates that the economic benefits to New Zealand end-users of the high-speed broadband applications considered will amount to NZ$32.8 billion ($26.8 billion) over 20 years."

The subsequent diagram "shows how this is calculated across the four sectors."



The NZ Cost Benefit Analysis illustrates the potential of an Australian Cost Benefit Analysis.

In the healthcare domain, the savings considered as part of the analysis included lower hospital admission and test costs, fewer emergency room visits, lower travel-related costs, lower long-term prescription drug costs, faster access to physicians and faster care delivery leading to savings in government expenditure on healthcare. The result was a NZ$5.9 billion [$4.8 billion] consumer surplus over 20 years. In the education domain, the savings considered are those that result from lower costs of skill enhancement, as well as reduced cost of course materials and savings on field trips. The result was a NZ$3.6 billion [$2.9 billion] consumer surplus over 20 years. Business services-related savings are achieved through improved productivity, lower travel-related costs, lower network and communication expenses, and savings (as well as new revenues) from the cloud-enablement of applications. The result in this domain was the largest - NZ$14.2 billion [$11.6 billion]. Economic gains in the dairy industry relate to increased dairy farm productivity and were calculated at NZ$9.1 billion [$7.4 billion] over 20 years. Annually the combined GDP impact of the build, and the consumer surplus from the applications, are worth about the same to New Zealand as the money we earn every year from our wine exports.

Once again, if the efficiency gains are worth this much money for New Zealand, what would they be worth for Australia?

Why is this so long?

Firstly, balance: if you're not thorough, you get swept away in the sea of opinions. Secondly, it's a resource for others in the media to help with groundwork and research. Thirdly as a resource for myself - future articles needn't be so long if I can link back to articles like this. Fourthly, it aims to answer any counter that someone puts towards an individual element.

This has all worked successfully before (video games and the Oslo massacre, the internet filter and the NBN a few times.

Furthermore, and this echoes Malcolm Turnbull himself, I too am sick of 'one-line sound bites' and the public being uninformed.

Too long; didn't read? Click here.

Conclusion

Comments like the following appear all over mainstream media, almost completely unchallenged, and they may even be ramping up:

"The approach we will take - we plan to take is about a quarter of the cost and a quarter of the time to provide an upgraded broadband service than the approach of fibre-to-the-premises that that Government is insisting the NBN Co take."

"There is no evidence whatsoever that the massive increase in speeds delivered by fibre-the-home will deliver any extra value or benefit to Australian households."

"There is not one contractor in Australia that believes the Government is going to roll out its National Broadband Network for $32 billion. Expectations are as high as $60 billion, $70 billion or even $100 billion for the National Broadband Network.

These statements are demonstrably untrue and some border on the ridiculous. This naturally raises questions about media and politics in Australia. Feel free to discuss them below, but I'm sticking with the technology debate.

We'd like to discuss the technical details, but this rarely happens and discussions increasingly descend into resembling shambolic accusation fests like this and, sadly, this.

What's most important, however, is that the fundamental aims of the Coalition's policy don't appear to be possible. The technology and governance minefield ahead of it needs a detailed map that navigates all the hurdles mentioned above in order for the following statement to ring true:

"Our broadband policy is to complete the national broadband network, but to do so sooner, cheaper - less cost to the taxpayer - and much more affordably for consumers and that is our plan."

It's not 100 per cent impossible, but based on the available information, it seems like it.