news The new Coalition Government has failed to successfully deliver what it had promised before the election would be a key report on the overall status of broadband infrastructure in Australia, instead releasing just before Christmas an extremely brief report of only several pages which does little to illuminate the situation.
In its broadband policy released in April 2013 (PDF), the Coalition made the following pledge: “Within 90 days the department of Broadband Communications and the digital economy, with the assistance of NBN Co and private carriers, will provide Parliament with a ranking of broadband quality and availability in all areas of Australia. This ranking will be published for comment and review and will guide prioritisation of the rollout.”
As the new Coalition Cabinet was sworn in on 19 September, this would have meant that the Department of Communication’s report in this area would be due in late December. On 23 December, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull released a statement stating that the Government had released a summary version of the report.
Turnbull listed a number of key findings from the report (available in PDF format here), such as the fact that while 9.9 million premises in Australia did have access to fixed-line broadband services, around 700,000 premises did not, and of the premises with access to ADSL broadband services over Telstra’s existing copper network, some 3.7 million of those were located in areas with an estimated peak median download speed of less than 9Mbps, while a further 920,000 had access to speeds of less than 4.8Mbps.
Turnbull stated that the Summary Report released in December was “the first release” of the broadband availability and quality analysis. “The Department of Communications is refining the detail of the analysis and compiling maps which will be published early in the new year along with the methodology used. There will be the opportunity to provide feedback on the methodology and the results,” the Minister wrote.
However, the report released by the Minister appears to be little more than three pages of extremely high-level summary overview material. It does not consist of a “ranking of broadband quality and availability in all areas of Australia” as the Coalition had promised would be delivered within 90 days of it taking office.
Furthermore, the report as generated does not appear to provide any useful geographical information at all that would allow NBN Co to modify its rollout plans of the Coalition’s Broadband Network. In the Coalition’s original broadband policy document, it stated that NBN Co would be required to amend its rollout plan with respect to the report, to grant priority to areas inadequately served with broadband at the moment.
In addition, it does not appear as though even the data released so far by the Coalition in this area is based on empirical measurement of Australian broadband speeds; instead, the Department appears to have primarily used extrapolated data in its report.
The Summary Report released by Turnbull states: “The findings presented in this document are based on a detailed spatial analysis of the coverage of broadband customer access networks, along with estimates of their likely performance given known constraints. This analysis uses the available information to measure broadband availability in terms of the infrastructure currently in place. It uses the possible speeds achievable over that infrastructure to measure quality. This methodology was determined after reference to international examples.”
Later in the report, it is stated that the Department only observed some 20,000 real-world measures of ADSL download speeds. It appears that the rest of the data was extrapolated based on factors such as the distance of a customer’s premises from telephone exchanges.
It appears likely that NBN Co itself already has extensive data sets available which supercede the data collated by the Department for this report, given that it is working closely with Telstra on construction of its broadband infrastructure and has access to extensive network information.
In his statement, Turnbull claimed that the report was “the latest step in the Government’s National Broadband Network (NBN) reform agenda in ensuring the network is rolled out sooner, cheaper to taxpayers and more affordably”.
However, analysis has shown that the Coalition is not planning to complete the previous Labor Government’s National Broadband Network project. Instead, the Coalition appears to be planning to drastically water down the network rollout, using inferior Fibre to the Node-style technology in many areas across Australia and abandoning up to a third of the NBN rollout wholesale, with a preferencing to upgrading existing HFC cable infrastructure owned by Telstra and Optus instead.
This approach has meant that the Coalition has admitted — just several months after the Federal Election — that it will no longer be able to keep its election promise of giving all Australians access to 25Mbps broadband speeds by 2016.
opinion/analysis
The broadband availability report released by the Minister prior to Christmas is, frankly, nothing short of brochureware. It contains only three and a bit pages of (rather large font) text, and does not consist of “a ranking of broadband quality and availability in all areas of Australia” as the Coalition had promised in April 2013.
It is one of the briefest Government “reports” of any kind that I have ever read. I do not think it worthy of the name. I would instead describe it as more of a press release than anything else, containing information which could have been compiled by a couple of graduates or even interns at the Department of Communications.
I really have no idea how anyone at NBN Co — with that company’s deep engineering expertise — is supposed to take it seriously. It is a farcical effort that the Government should be ashamed of, and reflects a new broken election promise for the Coalition, if a minor one.
Image credit: Star Trek: The Next Generation
I’ll be interested in seeing some more info about how they went about this analysis, in my experience the GNAF data set for premise location is troublesome at best
Well, they obviously have to work with what they have to work with.
Every single premise in Australia – every one – has an NBN Co ID number. If that’s not as good as it’s going to get I don’t know what is.
What’s interesting is that this really is a summary – the figures had to be compiled by putting all the smaller numbers together – they DO have exact break downs by area (easy to do, as Telstra would have all of the necessary data) and are holding it back for some reason…
I don’t see why there have to be “smaller numbers” Michael?
If you take each Exchange/RIM that’s served by DSL and the number of premises in those Exchange Serving Areas/Rim Serving Areas, you end up with about 10 million premises. Subtract the number of ports unavailable compared to premises per exchange/RIM and you get the 700K who can’t.
The numbers we’re looking at here you can literally compile from the internet and public data. The ABS does it every 6 months:
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/8153.0/
The speeds are likely garnered from the myriad of publicly testable speedtests/DSL heatmaps scattered over the Australian Interwebs.
It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if they in fact used NBNCo’s own pre-rollout (ie 2010) commissioned report for the first Corporate Plan. ie. they’ve literally done no work, just collated it in a different way.
“that it will no longer be able to keep its election promise”
This is very generous language, Renai. It should be changed to read, more accurately, as follows.
“that it will not be keeping its election promise”
After all, the election promise could of course be kept if they actually wanted to.
Graham writes:
“that it will not be keeping its election promise”
Exactly, it is a willful deviation from their promise. It has naught to do with “can’t or are unable”.
You can get better collated data from DSL heat maps available online.
It’s nothing short of a joke. But not surprising. I would severely doubt the ‘extended data’ is much better. An actual analysis would take at least 12 months and require tens of thousands of real world tests from most exchanges.
I don’t expect anything of the sort however.
What a disaster.
To think we could have had a world class telecommunication system.
Turnbull should definitely fall on his sword.
After he helps Abbott fall on his first.
“It appears that the rest of the data was extrapolated based on factors such as the distance of a customer’s premises from telephone exchanges.”
I stopped reading after this sentence. Using distance from the exchange / RIM in this day in age is farcical when measuring speeds. The state of Telstra’s copper makes it a guessing game. Someone 5km from one exchange might get a faster speed than someone else 1km from their own exchange due to a combination of many factors including the state of the copper.
I have experienced this first hand. I put up with speeds of 2Mbit and below on ADSL+ in the Sawtell exchange for 6 years when I was only 2.4km away from the exchange. The speeds towards the end (we ended up selling and building elsewhere) dropped below to sub 1Mbit.
Coalition using the old “theoretical speeds” trick again to justify their fraudband policy.
Fall on his sword, we should march on him and put him to the sword.
Mr Fraudband is what he is “a bald faced liar”.
There will be no improvements to broadband in Australia apart from those that are in existing fibre build areas yet to be finished and some rural areas when the satellite launches take place, they fortunately have already been paid for by the previous Government.
The “node trials” have already been pushed back to a notional date of 3rd Quarter 2015, which of course means nothing, Mr Fraudband hasn’t even commenced negotiations with Telstra for the purchase of the copper.
No FTTN will be built prior to the next election, the “node trials” are only 9 months out from the election.
Mr Fraudband’s new “dream NBN” is to give Telstra and Optus sacks of money to fix up their dilapidated HFC cable, he has no commercial agreement for this policy, at the moment it’s just mouth flapping.
Telstra and Optus must already realise Mr Fraudband has painted himself into a corner and will come after him for awfully large sacks.
I’m no tech head Kerry has long decided there will be no NBN, so all publicity re the NBN will be terminated, ministers and members will be told not to talk about it. The entire information system of the NBN will be closed and no discussions with the press will take place.
The new government hopes if nothing is said for long enough the NBN will just be forgotten.
“…so all publicity re the NBN will be terminated, …”
There used to be 3+ articles per week in the Tech section of the Sydney Morning Herald, online. Since early Dec12, I think could count the number of NBN articles on one hand.
This lack of articles is quite understandable as those ‘Faster, Cheaper NBN promises seem to have evaporated. (must have been ‘Non Core’?)
From what I read there’s to be just some winding down completion of existing work, node testing & perhaps HCF upgrades during this term of “government”.
My promised “25Mbps by 2016” will apparently remain an ‘Up To’ at it’s present 0.013Mbps version of ‘Superfast Broadband.’
I don’t understand how a communications minister can be so very out of touch with what is happening around him, or how that is even an acceptable outcome?
He seemed reasonably happy with the report, slamming the prior government; despite that report making clear that the basic changes desired by Turnbull, expose huge risk and cost concerns.
This after the “technology agnostic” off-hand dismissal of questions raised.
“I don’t understand how a communications minister can be so very out of touch with what is happening around him, or how that is even an acceptable outcome?”
Some context to help you on your way.
The political party that brought you Richard Alston and Helen Coonan. We once thought Malcolm might have broken the mould but alas he’s even worse than ignorant because rather than doing nothing he’s destroying something that was a good idea to realise the achievement of nothing while spending nearly as much as doing the right thing. He is ignorant of consequences though – it’s just that we suffer for his arrogance.
Well who ever voted for this mob in should be ashamed of themselves.
Maybe so, but dont forget the so-called journalists who swallowed the “brochure bait” hook, line and sinker.
AFAIK, the only mea culpa from the media has come from Renai (to his credit) but it’s all too little too late.
The reason Turnbull thinks he can get away with a brochure is because the Coalition won the election with nothing more than a bullet point brochure.
To be fair, the Coalition ‘won’ because of the voting public’s anger towards Rudd and Gillard.
For all the talk of “man dates” – the Coalition was never ready to govern (something reinforced on an almost daily basis at this point); they were simply considered less toxic, at the election booth.
This might be the first elected government (in some time) to potentially not get a second term. Indeed Turnbull is unlikely to have achieved much (beyond gutting NBNco’s ability to function) by the next election.
Voters are a bit fickle and will happily boot a mob out they’re not happy with – regardless of policy.
Quicker. Faster. This is how it’s done, kids. Take notes.
I am in awe.
Pretty much the above.
The fact that even w/ Liberal winning they still had the lowest primary votes in a huge majority of areas. The magic of course comes w/ the preference system which meant most minor parties votes trickled through to Liberal.
The tragedy here is that I rather doubt Abbott will be a “1 term government”. It’s still the 1st year and the voting public is insanely fickle and short sighted. They can get away w/ trashing everything for the first 2 years as long as they can distract the majority w/ a new shiney handout or whatever to make them seem like a “good government” compared to the opposition whilst neatly shoving all the dust from the first to two years in power under the rug.
The Primary vote point is meaningless because we have a preferential system. People voting for minor parties know that their preferences flow through to the majors even if they sometimes forget that they can order their preferences however they want.
The worrying thing for Abbott would be his polling post election. Usually there’s some kind of honeymoon period. Rudd went up 10% in the months after his election, Keating went up a good 5% before latter getting thumped by Howard and Howard managed to get a couple of % each time. Even Gillard which we all seem to remember as being DOA managed to hover around her 2010 poll for a bit even going +2%. Which was the high point for Labor in the polls before now.
Abbott has gone down 6%. There’s some weight to the thought that this might be a single term government. That said 52:48 is basically neck and neck especially this early. Again, Gillard was at 52% at about this point and look how well that went. Either way Abbott has his work cut out for him, he definitely won’t have another election as easy as the last one.
@skywake: That’s pretty much what I meant in regards to the “magic” of the preferential system. Indeed at the end of the day the primary votes aren’t of much use when it comes to numbers to get someone at the seat. However it is still telling in the fact that people were not willing to put the Coalition as “1” even though Labor was seen as a “very toxic” party come polling day. Most people know that preferences will filter through and yet when faced with a “bad” government they still were not willing to “vote for the other guy”
That being said any polls and percentages this stage of the term IMHO is frankly not really relevant to an election come 3 years. All it’s really showing is how much the current government is pursuing it’s own “unpopular” initiatives at this early stage to get it out of the way. Anything can happen between now and 3 years time. And you will find most parties are quite adept at miliking the “popular vote” come 3rd year when election is looming. 3 years is a long time for the average voter and the Howard years have shown us that even an unpopular PM can still win come election if the “right thing at the right time” happens.
We really need a decent 3rd party (at least).
Only having the 2 majors is pretty crap for a democracy especially when you’ve got a choice between 2 bad options.
Perhaps people will need to learn that if you vote wholesale for the other guy, you’ve given complete control over to them to do whatever they want.
IIRC once upon a time we had the Democrats…
Unfortunately the party self imploded when they went to the elections during the Howard era when the party proper voted in favour of GST.
“Anything can happen”
My bet is we’ll have another another war in the ‘national interest’
Didn’t vote for them, don’t want their NBNNNN and will be here to say “I told you so” when it fails.
Hasn’t it already failed? Are their election promises still achievable? Will we have 25mb/s minimum downloads to all Australians by 2016? Will the cost be a quarter of what it was going to cost the ALP?
They have failed already and it’s difficult not to feel that the only remaining course of action is to sit back and watch how far they sink.
my brother recently moved off his optus 100 meg HFC connection to adsl 2 .. to get better speeds.
so much congestion in his area on the optus network. Can the optus and telstra hfc network be upgraded to deal with congestion >?
Can? Sure.
Will be? Given the following, that:
– NBNco have already admitted that speeds can’t be guaranteed; and that that is as a consequence of the mixed bag of random underwear (that Turnbull has decided is equivalent to a heterogeneous network), and
– No negotiations have started for any funding of any HFC builds, and
– NBNco don’t own, or lease either HFC network
.. who the hell knows. Telstra are trialling VDSL and have said exactly ZILCH about HFC. Meanwhile Greenfield sites are seeing Fibre being rolled out as though nothing changed.
There would need to be funding available to convince either Optus or Telstra that they should start throwing money at networks neither of whom are interested in.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if either simply offered both outright – for an up front cash injection.
I called it a “train wreck in slow motion” when I originally read the NBN report (commissioned by Turnbull) back in December. The train is still crashing. And it’ll just keep on crashing for the foreseeable future.
It strikes me that noone has yet asked where the data comes from. The 20,000 empirical data points are (at a guess!) likely to come from Malcolms survey he ran on his website, for which I am certain the data would be hard to trust, as I know people were inputting spurious details at the time. What do you guys think, is this likely to be his data set?
No surprise. Turdball is a liar, a blatant hypocrite and a disgrace.
Transparency is the Coalitions all time biggest lie, and this is what will result in them lucky to see one term of government.
“Turnbull listed a number of key findings from the report (available in PDF format here), such as the fact that while 9.9 million premises in Australia did have access to fixed-line broadband services, around 700,000 premises did not…”
I love this. My parent’s house in the Perth metropolitan area is connected to an ADSL enabled exchange and has been since around 2000. When we tried to get ADSL multiple times we were repeatedly told we couldn’t. This didn’t stop the SAME ISPs calling and telling us we were able to get ADSL a month or so down the track. When we pursued it repeatedly we were finally told by telstra “You will not be able to get broadband until the technology changes”. A mixture of distance to the exchange and line quality made it impossible for us.
We moved from dialup to ISDN before telstra shut that down and tried to force us onto their incredibly expensive 3G. Eventually we went to a fixed line of sight wireless broadband under the governments broadband guarantee program. When this was shut down, we thankfully were able to go with vividwireless unlimited, who had just started up, and cancelled our phone line (because how can we afford a 3g connection for a family of 5 heavy internet users??).
Cue 2014, still can’t get ADSL, our area was originally scheduled for fibre NBN work to begin in February of this year but it is now cancelled (thanks malcolm).
Yet, since the exchange is still ADSL enabled (and if we still had a landline you can bet we would get calls trying to put us onto ADSL) I guarantee we are counted in that 9.9 million who apparently have access to ADSL. Even worse, because we ditched our land line and went for a wireless internet provider you can bet we are cited in the stats which say ‘people prefer wireless’. No, we would have always preferred a reliable fixed line service, but it was never available to us.
It is infuriating…
I feel your pain…
Practically had a near similar experience years ago when I tried to swap to ADSL in my area back around ’99-’00. I checked my number w/ my ISP and found the area was eligible for ADSL. Asked for the transfer from dial-up and paid the fee. A week or so later my application was placed on “hold” due to the now infamous “RIM-hell” estate problem. I called up my ISP and they said it was on hold indefinitely until Telstra fixes up the exchange.
The very next day I get a wonderful mail from Telstra saying “BigPond is now available in your area!” suffice to say I was not impressed. I rang up Telstra and they said “oh but we can still offer you dial-up!” =/
Good news is that they eventually fixed the RIM about 6-8 months later. The bad news is in true Telstra form after about 2-3 years when I upgraded my connection from 256 to 1500 it was a pointless excercise since Telstra had neglected the area and exchange and speeds were being throttled to dial-up speeds during peak hour…. and this was only fixed about 3-4 years ago.
And this the biggest reason why I’ve stopped paying attention ever since the Coalition released their “report”. I’ve lived through first hand on the issues were headed for in 10-20 years time when HFC (and eventually FTTN) begins to struggle with the capacity needed because of a combination of bad investment right now and the lack of any guarantees that the market will even bother to maintain/upgrade the network themselves because “it’s too expensive”. The announcement of HFC being “enough” is in my books the equivalent of Telstra telling me years ago “but hey we can offer you good dial-up!” because dial-up was still “useable” back then. I’m not looking forward to reliving that again =/
HFC can be made to be very usable. It just needs the contention ratio lowered.
As for the Telstra thing, that’s pretty normal. We could say the same things about the other ISPs are their lack of investment in non metro areas. I live on the Sunshine Coast and my only option is to get ADSL through Telstra hardware.
@Ryan: HFC and FTTN are both very useable. There is no debate against that. In fact both would still be considerably better than my existing ADSL1 connection. I’ve tried to upgrade several times to ADSL2 and been stonewalled due to the exchange being full.
My issue however is that w/ a system w/ various levels of capacity you loose the most important part of the original labor plan – ubiquity. Where in I can move to X city from X state and still get the same options for internet services. And the other problem of mixed mediums w/ mixed capacities is what happens when we reach that capacity? I’m fairly sure HFC will reach its capacity before we can milk everything from FTTN itself so what happens then? Especially w/ no guarantees the private sector will even bother to keep the networks maintained and optimised after the “Coalition Network” upgrades… that’s a problem for another government at a later time?
Not quite good enough in my books and misses the point on why the NBN was being done.
Ryan, I think you’ll find no-one believes HFC would be “unusable” for a broadband network. The problem is, NBNCo’s own Strategic Review suggested a CIR (Committed Information Rate- ie. permanent capacity per virtual connection) of just 4Mbps, or a contention of around 1:22, about half that of the 1:50 or so now of Telstra’s. NBNCo’s own FTTH CIR, at a hardware level, is 78Mbps (1:1.3).
The problem is precisely what you’ve said- Contention ratio. And they have allocated (publicly) no money or time so far to change it. Sure, it can be done, no problems. There are plenty of HFC providers who have globally. But that’s not the issue. The issue is time and money, because the Coalition Broadband Network is all about saving both.
Same here Michael, our whole suburb Tweed Heads West NSW has no ADSL but when I rang up Telstra the Telstra guy swore black and blue that we could get ADSL, all we have here is mobile broadband. Even Telstra don’t know who can and can’t get ADSL on their own copper phone lines.
Frustrating, hey :(
If telstra don’t even know how can malcolm make these statements? Because he doesn’t care about facts and accuracy it seems.
I wish an engineer was running the communications portfolio, not a lawyer or investor or whatever malcolm sells himself as…
Renai wrote…
This approach has meant that the Coalition has admitted — just several months after the Federal Election — that it will no longer be able to keep its election promise of giving all Australians access to 25Mbps broadband speeds by 2016.
Actually, buried in the Strategic Review on page 105 is this admission…
(quote OCR’d due being a scanned page)
So the SR says they could do more to meet their election promise but said “screw it” and took the cheap way out and simply said it can’t be done.
$7,000 Million
Turnbull is has lied. Either then, now or both.
Interesting find Cameron…
I also note the admission of FttP being more profitable than FttN.
A point normally, but typically, childishly argued by a few usual suspects here.
So, 41 + 7= 48 bn.
There still is no price for copper but insert any figure between 10 and 20 bn – 58 to 68 bn. At the lnp priced 71bn fttp looks better yet again. Good catch, I certainly don’t trust them to not need the 7bn contingency so I’m pricing that in immediately.
The more the LNPs own work gets looked over the less there is to support it… Its depressing that for a self professed tech agnostic there’s still effort being tipped into something that looks more and more a fated endeavour if I ever saw one.
And given events so far, I’ll go for ‘both’
Australia’s telecommunications situation going forward….a quick summary:
Could’ve….would’ve…should’ve….DIDN’T!
What a disappointing lot we are.
*sigh*
…and I forgot to mention…
Excellent picture Renai…spot on!
:-)
Was the promise based on broadband policy a core promise? I seem to recall something about only core promises counting as being broken and other promises not really being promises. Possibly the Prime Minister? I cannot remember.
Given that the Communications Minister relied on an election being decided on this topic to dismiss a petition it would seem to have been a core promise and thus require honouring.
Someone else may recall more about the recent election this type of promise mattering for whether one has to keep them issue came up.
The strategic review contains quite a number of scenarios, assertions and conclusions, not all of which seem to be compatible with other points or with known parameters.
It’s almost as if a confusing coverage was produced to provoke a whole range of second-issue discussions, while the real agenda gets played out quietly in the background.
I have read a lot of information about the NBN since the LNP were elected and I keep coming up with the same question – just who the hell voted this mob into office???
Everything to date that Abbott has put out there as his “new” policies is just old Howard stuff rehashed, and sometimes not even rehashed. Abbott was caught out recently dredging up an old Howard report with future projections for something, I forget what. So I guess the clue as to what Abbott is going to do in the future is to look back at what Howard did. This guy has never had a single thought of his own. And they don’t care about the impact of any of their policies, their primary aim is to destroy anything put in place by the ALP regardless of whether it works or not. Very spiteful and petty, just like they were in opposition and just like they are in government.
I do recall Howard’s big plan just before he got the boot was for Telstra to do the NBN (that thought is horrific in itself given they were already sold as a vertically integrated monopoly) with the massive promise of 256kbps for all Australians. So……..perhaps that is what we can expect from rabbit and turdball.
I have read a lot of information about the NBN since the LNP were elected and I keep coming up with the same question – just who the hell voted this mob into office???
Everything to date that Abbott has put out there as his “new” policies is just old Howard stuff rehashed, and sometimes not even rehashed. Abbott was caught out recently dredging up an old Howard report with future projections for something, I forget what. So I guess the clue as to what Abbott is going to do in the future is to look back at what Howard did. This guy has never had a single thought of his own. And they don’t care about the impact of any of their policies, their primary aim is to destroy anything put in place by the ALP regardless of whether it works or not. Very spiteful and petty, just like they were in opposition and just like they are in government.
I do recall Howard’s big plan just before he got the boot was for Telstra to do the NBN (that thought is horrific in itself given they were already sold as a vertically integrated monopoly) with the massive promise of 256kbps for all Australians. So……..perhaps that is what we can expect from rabbit and turdball.
Our Nation’s loss. One chance to do it right.
Jason Clare speaking about the release of the NBN Strategic Review (12/12/2013)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-yIhPP7aVg&feature=youtu.be
“Overall the analysis found that there are areas of inadequate access to infrastructure across
the country – approximately 1.4 million premises (13 per cent) are in areas where fewer
than 40 per cent of premises can access a fixed broadband service.”
This doesn’t even make sense!
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