NBN Co chief executive Mike Quigley this afternoon denied his revelation today of National Broadband Network speeds up to 1Gbps had anything to do with supporting Labor’s election chances, in the face of a Coalition policy that would see his fledgling broadband company shut down.

The planned 1Gbps speeds were revealed by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and Prime Minister Julia Gillard at the formal launch this morning of NBN services in Tasmania, after Quigley informed Conroy of the possibility of the significantly enhanced speeds — 10 times the 100Mbps speeds initially promised — last night.

The planned speed boost will see Labor’s broadband policy promising speeds of up to 1Gbps when the NBN is built — compared with the Coalition’s policy, which only promises speeds of 12Mbps.

Quigley claimed the move was normal practice for NBN Co. “We have always had a policy inside the company, when we’ve made decisions, we reach out to the industry at events such as this,” he said today at a lunch held in Sydney by the Australian Information Industry Association.

“What do we do — do we sit on it, just because there’s an election on, or do we do what we normally do – which is announce it out to the industry?” he asked. “I decided the right thing to do was to announce it to the industry.”

The future of NBN Co is very much up in the air at the moment, with polls showing a close election and the Coalition promising to wind the company up and sell off its assets if it takes power. But Quigley said the company was continuing to execute on its objectives, and would do so until the Government told it to stop.

“There’s not much I can do about the coincidence, and it’s not such a big coincidence if you think about it,” he said. “We just continue to make progress. We continue to work on the product constructs and the dimensioning.”

“It is no great surprise, we are going to have things evolve and change, and I have said right from the beginning, when asked the question — ‘Are you limited to 100Mbps?’ — no. We can do much more than that.”

Earlier on in the lunch, Data#3 managing director and Australian technology sector stalwart John Grant took the stage to slam the Coalition’s broadband policy.

The central planks of the policy are a competitive backhaul network, regional and metropolitan wireless networks and an ADSL enrichment program that will target telephone exchanges without ADSL2+ broadband — as well as cancelling the NBN project.

Grant said the Coalition’s policy did not address the issue of structural problems in the telecommunications market and had not been fleshed out to the level of detail that it should have been.

“The fact is that there is a market failure in the communications environment in Australia — and it started 10 years ago,” said Grant. “The government’s proposal is that they’re going to build it, make money from it and sell it — sounds OK to me.”

Quigley was asked whether he had made his own career contingency plans for a Coalition victory, and what the temperature was within NBN Co amongst staff who could shortly lose their jobs.

He replied that he hadn’t spent any time worrying about his own career and pointed out that new staff were still choosing to join NBN Co – with the existing employees focused on the task ahead. But, he noted, the NBN Co employees were “only human”.

Quigley is “non-political, he assures us,” joked Grant at the end of his own speech. “We’d like to think he could come back and have another lunch after 21 August.”

Related posts:

1. Quigley openly slams Coalition’s broadband policy
2. Conroy promises 1Gbps NBN speeds
3. 1Gbps demand years away, says Thodey
4. Ageing Australia doesn’t want 1Gbps: Linton
5. Election rant 2: NBN Co’s outrageous Labor favour

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1. Paul
   Posted 13/08/2010 at 9:32 am | Permalink | Reply

   There is no legal use at my home that would need that bandwidth.

   Are they doing an iiNet and promoting movie downloading?

2. bryan
   Posted 13/08/2010 at 2:33 pm | Permalink | Reply

   @Paul

   Guess you’ve never heard of HD Video On Demand, Video Conferencing or Cloud based operating systems.

   Multiple those by even a handful of devices in a house (e.g multiple TV’s) and the need for bandwidth shoots up very quickly.

3. ML Atkin
   Posted 13/08/2010 at 6:55 pm | Permalink | Reply

   *sigh*

   1GB/s of bread and circuses for the easily bought. Please note the speed for the bush and other poorly connected areas is still only going to be 12 MB/s despite the 1GB/s hype.

   One of the things you notice when living outside of cities is something called disparity. We still pay the same taxes but get a fraction of the services and the services we do get are often hours away by poor roads.

   Take the broadband situation at the moment. If you’re lucky you get 1.5MB/s in the bush yet 20MB/s is quite common in cities. That’s about fives times faster. When the NBN is complete – possibly eight years away where I live – I’ll get 12MB/s and the cities will be 1GB/s. That’s over 80 times faster.

   Some NBN advocates are pushing the idea that such high speeds will be required for new but yet unknown applications in the near future. Guess what that means for the bush? Yep, we’ll be further behind than we are now.

   Oh, and I’ve still yet to see anyone put forward an application that will realistically require 100MB/s or more in the average home. High-def video conferencing for home office workers? Sheesh, Hollywood actors already complain that HD TV shows up all their skin imperfections. Why would a bunch of office drones need more quality than Hollywood?

   I may bang on about this bush/city divide but Aus used to be the country of the Fair Go. Doesn’t seem that way much these days.

4. ML Atkin
   Posted 13/08/2010 at 6:58 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Oops. Correction: It should have read:

   “If you’re lucky you get 1.5MB/s in the bush yet 8MB/s is quite common in cities.”