Federal Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has claimed that a comparable service to the National Broadband Network (NBN) could have been achieved with half of the program’s budget. 

 

Mr Turnbull has argued that had the program remained as a fibre to the node (FTTN) project, the price would have been more than halved and speeds of up to 60MBps could have been achieved.

 

At the project’s inception, the NBN was to have been a FTTN that would upgrade Telstra’s aging copper network, with the then CEO of Telstra Sol Trujillo backing the FTTN.

 

However, the Government has since made the decision to shift the project to a fibre to the home (FTTH) model which, while it will be significantly more expensive,  is expected to deliver speeds of up to 100MBps.

 

Mr Turnbull delivered his argument in a major speech before parliament, arguing that a mixture of technologies was still a viable choice in reducing the NBN’s costing.

 

“With a fibre-to-the-node configuration like that, if the last segment of copper was 750 metres or less—and we had this confirmed only today by one of the leading telecommunications companies in the world—a download speed of 60 megabits per second would be very achievable, along with an upload speed, depending on whether it was 750 metres or closer, of five to 10 megabits up to an effectively symmetrical speed of around 50 to 60 megabits per second,” Mr Turnbull said.