THE HON MARK DREYFUS QC
ACTING SHADOW MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS
SHADOW ATTORNEY-GENERAL
SHADOW MINISTER FOR NATIONAL SECURITY
MEMBER FOR ISAACS
AUSTRALIANS PAYING MORE FOR MALCOLM TURNBULL'S SECOND-RATE NBN
An analysis in The Australian this morning finds that Australian families face an average price hike of nearly 20 per cent on internet services as they migrate to entry-level plans on the Governments second-rate National Broadband Network.
Thanks to Malcolm Turnbull's decision to rely on an ageing copper network for the rollout of his NBN, millions of Australian families will end up paying more for a second-rate broadband service that is failing all expectations.
Far too many Australians are enduring unacceptable connection delays and faults, slow data speeds, unusable services and drop-outs.
Last year the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) found that complaints about the NBN have increased by almost 150 per cent.The vast majority of the postcodes that recorded the most complaints have been relegated to Malcolm Turnbull's flawed copper-based fibre-to-the-node technology.
This illustrates how the Government's political obsession with ageing technologies is not only entrenching a sub digital-divide within the fixed line footprint, but worse still increasing cost of living pressures for low income Australians.
All the while Communications Minister Mitch Fifield keeps making farcical attempts to claim the NBN is on time and on budget.
Before the election Malcolm Turnbull promised the NBN would be delivered for $29.5 billion and be complete by the end of 2016. After the election he promised it would cost $41 billion and pass around 5.3 million premises by the end of 2016.
According to NBN Cos half-yearly results by the end of 2016 NBN Co had already received over $23.8 in equity injections so far, with 3.8 million premises passed, and forecasting to spend $50 billion by completion.
So by any measure the NBN is behind schedule and woefully over budget.
The scale of future costs to maintain and operate the ageing copper and HFC networks also remains a big unknown.
The Government continues to try and deceive the Australian people about the Prime Ministers woeful track record in delivering the National Broadband Network. The simple fact is that Australians will pay more for a slow and out-of-date NBN.
MONDAY, 13 FEBRUARY 2017
