The federal government’s “bastardisation” of the NBN rollout has put the country’s “economic future back 50 years”.
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That is the message from Launtel director Damian Ivereigh.
“What Australia needed – and still needs - is infrastructure that delivers internet fast enough and reliable enough for us to forget about our internet connection,” he said.
“We should treat it like water and power – trusted infrastructure that is just there and never gets in our way.”
In 2017, Akamai’s State of the Internet report ranked Australia’s internet speed 50th in the world, with South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan and Thailand among the better performing countries.
A Liberal spokesman said the changes made to the NBN rollout were prudent, responsible and well considered.
“If we had stuck to Labor’s model, tens of thousands of Tasmanian homes and businesses would still be languishing on legacy networks or left behind without any internet at all,” he said.
About 45 per cent of Tasmanians have fibre-to-the-premise. According to Mr Ivereigh, only the pure fibre rollout of the original NBN build model can deliver the internet Australia needs.
“No copper technology will ever have either the speed or the reliability, and we need both,” he said.
“Are we going to wake up in 10 years and say ‘Thank heavens [Malcolm] Turnbull and [Tony] Abbott didn’t spend all that money on the NBN.
“By the time 2020 comes around, we will already have lost 10 years of the technological lead we could have had.”
The scathing attack on the nation’s internet infrastructure was welcomed by Bass Labor MHR Ross Hart.
“The day Abbott and Turnbull irresponsibly made the NBN a political football was the day Australia’s future digital economy was put on the line,” Mr Hart said.
Mr Hart knew of about 20 businesses at the Launceston Airport that were spending anywhere from $5000 to $20,000 to upgrade infrastructure from the Liberals’ copper to fibre.
Mr Ivereigh credited infighting and power struggles to destroying the Liberal party’s credibility.
“I propose we get rid of the zombie government and give the ALP a chance to reignite the potential of our economy by salvaging what we can of this now broken NBN project,” he said. The Liberal spokesman said Labor’s gold-plated fibre-to-the-premises NBN policy would have driven residential broadband costs up, and taken up to eight years longer to complete.