They enjoy various internet speeds and have a vague grasp of a future where downloads occur in an instant.

What gets their attention is the massive price tag - anywhere between $29 billion claimed by the Coalition, and a glitzy Labor alternative that could have reached $90 billion.

For businesses and households in Tasmania, with expectations of dazzling speeds sooner than later, the reality is a painfully slow process involving asbestos problems, soaring costs, contractor controversies and politics.

By now the average householder is wondering if this will end the same way as the much vaunted natural gas roll-out to the suburbs, which slowed to a crawl once public funding dried up.

So far our household connection target has reached only 10 per cent; years behind the original 2013 operating estimate. Cable laying seems erratic.

It seems to be everywhere and nowhere. Tantalisingly close, but still years off.

Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his Coalition team have won the election and won the NBN debate. The Labor vision is now history. The Coalition vision is now the fact. Therefore we are waiting on the Turnbull alternative with its cheaper costs (hopefully still $29 billion) and faster speeds sooner, as long as the copper wire infrastructure doesn't get in the way.

Let's not be too political or insular about this. Faster internet speed, in places where speeds are currently costly and slow, is our ticket out of the electronic stone age.

Like it or not, we are in a new millennium of highly competitive technology in a much smaller world.

If faster household speeds seem like an unaffordable and discretionary luxury, the same approach does not apply to business and all its pressures.

It is no longer relevant for Mr Turnbull and his Coalition colleagues to compare and contrast with a defunct Labor alternative.

What interests us now is how Mr Turnbull plans to deliver his model, and the question of when this will happen, at what cost, and to whom.

- BARRY PRISMALL, deputy editor.