blog By all accounts, 2014 is shaping up as a pretty good year for the actual National Broadband Network rollout. As I write on Delimiter 2.0 today (paywalled), the project has a solid amount of Fibre to the Premises construction work set to deliver this year, and there are other reasons to be optimistic about how the next 12 months will pan out. A sample paragraph:
“With hundreds of thousands of new fibre premises scheduled to come on line and thousands of others opened to wholesale access, 2014 is slated to be the long-awaited first banner year that will see all of the National Broadband Network Company’s hard work finally start to pay off in bulk. But unfortunately it’ll also be the last, as the Coalition’s plan to rip apart Labor’s NBN vision starts to takes effect 12 months down the track.”
However, there’s a darker side to the 2014 outlook for the NBN, and that’s its new political reality. The Coalition is set to drastically overhaul the project, and it’s likely the implications of that will be felt from 2015, meaning 2014 will be the first and last golden year for this project. It’s a pity that the project will be so drastically modified just as soon as it was starting to deliver … but then, that’s politics. Tragic, really.