How can you possibly quantify the future benefits of the NBN ? Nobody could have predicted that when the copper lines were installed that one day it would be primarily used for the internet. And the historic changes to the world economy it has caused. So why even attempt to do it ? Or why not just say it will cost $50 billion but result in $500 trillion worth of benefits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_premises_by_countr...
You can also look at how much people valued the additional speed, what new things they did, etc.
Wish someone would write an article summarising the overseas experience of FTTP.
Also, what is opportunity cost of NBN? Could we spend money to create a high-tech sector in Australia perhaps?
The ALP tend to use the NBN as a catch-all for tech policy - "don't worry we have innovation covered - its all the NBN".
Works well in Singapore. Just the cable that goes out form Singapore to, say, the US is not fat enough.
You're right that cost/benefit analysis is hard for transformative things like this, but the citizens throwing their hands up and saying "I don't care WHAT it costs" is like Pavlov's bell to politicians.
When they promised it for 40 billion in 3 years ... well. No. That was never going to happen. Imagine how many streets there are in your suburb. How many suburbs are there in your city? How many in the country?
Somehow in just 750 working days they were going to source thousands of contractors, open hundreds of thousands of pits or dig thousands of new ditches, feed millions of kilometres of new cable, wire in millions of homes, install tens of thousands of new racks in exchanges without expanding the exchanges ... and somehow nothing would go wrong and nobody would fuck up and there'd be no asbestos or blocked tubes or inaccurate records or particularly tough ground or shonky contractors or labour shortages or bad weather or delayed deliveries.
3 years.
This is what makes me mad. We were promised an amazing thing and so many of my friends and colleagues took absolute leave of their senses over it. It's embarrassing. We bitch about salesmen promising impossible bullshit to close a sale ... and then we bought impossible bullshit hook, line and sinker.
If this can't be done, even to an order of magnitude, then is the project worth pursuing?
If we allow spending decisions to be guided by Pascal's Wager, why aren't we spending infinite dollars on it? Why aren't we investing all our taxes into fusion reactors, flying cars and the fountain of youth?
> Or why not just say it will cost $50 billion but result in $500 trillion worth of benefits.
Because infrastructure decisions shouldn't be made by Dr Evil.
If the alternative was proposing to do the full project but address all those concerns that would be wonderful. But that is not the choice we have. And it may not be a realistic choice at all. Every single large project like this that has ever been undertaken has had these kind of problems. Look at the east west link in Melbourne - no business plan, no (public) cost benefit analysis, the whole thing commercial in confidence. I agree it's disgusting and in my view ideally would be unconstitutional (when it's our money, we get to see how it's spent - even if that inflates costs, that's the price of democracy, suck it up).
But the bigger problem is that we've manufactured a political environment where it's more expedient to hide all this stuff than to openly talk about problems, uncertainties and vision far into the future. Even your own words reflect that - you're criticizing them for problems in planning a project that is a one of a kind - never been undertaken before anywhere, and never will again. It's just an unrealistic expectation at some level that it can ever go perfectly.
In the long run FTTP is the correct solution. In Turnbull's place I would have pushed for a slowdown on the rollout. No matter who does it, the NBN will probably not be finished in this decade.
When government is spending taxpayers' money it doesn't care about efficiency, only about getting a slice of the pie. Family members, business partners and overcharging contractors feast on these multibillion dollar projects, and only them.
We've seen this happen with "Building the edu revolution", house insulation and so on. Porting bloody e-tax to Mac cost them $5.2 million.
The smaller the spending on NBN the smaller the waste.
Govt should focus on reducing friction for business, eliminating monopolies and building a healthy economy.
Competition and market forces can take care of the fiber just fine. If we had those.
If we leave it up to the market then only the profitable sectors will get high speed internet. The rest (i.e. rural and country areas, outer city, poor neighborhoods) will be left with the decrepitated copper system. How exactly does that help anyone or the economy ?
How fast is the actual rollout?
We don't know. Commercial-in-confidence. And NBNCo say they don't keep figures down to the street level anyhow (which begs the question of which basis they are using to pay contractors).
How much has already been borrowed? We don't know. Commercial-in-confidence.
How much has been spent? We don't know. Commercial-in-confidence.
Insofar as we have to dig up half the flaming countryside, FTTP is probably worth it on a long-term basis. But that doesn't excuse the project from normal project management requirements.
And it shouldn't be excused from being transparent to the Parliament and public. The abuse of commercial-in-confidence for companies completely owned by the government is a backdoor for politicians of all stripes to avoid budgetary accountability while still leaving states and the commonwealth on the hook for debts incurred.
Where was the proper front end cost/benefit analysis? There wasn't one. Where was the 3-5 years of planning, surveying and preparation? There wasn't any. Where is the proper contract management? Oh, I guess we'll let NBNCo contract it to Telstra who will contract it to an engineering firm who will contract it to that bloke who has a van and who used to work for Optus.
Ends are important. But for the amount of money spent, so are the bloody means.