The below interview was for an article I co-authored with iTnews’ Brett Winterford.
The interview was conducted with Professor Reginald Coutts, one of the six panel members for the National Broadband Network.
You can read the full story here: Minchin rebuked by Expert Panel ‘whistleblowers’
Apologies for any grammatical mistakes in advance.
Ben: Has there been a cost benefit analysis on the NBN?
The government made an announcement on April 7th.
In terms of the broad directions of the FTTP, the core back bone, broadband, wireless, and satellite backhaul et cetera,it is all consistent with what we recommended.
In terms of the broad capital costs the number forty-three billion dollars is the original costings that were certainly around in the industry for FTTN, which is fibre just going to a node in the street and not all the way to the home.
The numbers that were really being talked about, total cover costs, were about fifteen billion dollars, of which the Government obviously was talking about 4.7.
If you look at a number of quite comprehensive reports that have been done in the UK, the BSG reports, that are all in the public domain…(they suggest that) FTTN, all the way to the home, you sort of multiply on the amount of capital, it varies on many factors, anywhere between 3 and 5.
What contributes to about 80 percent of that capital cost is what we call civil engineering works.
For example if you decide, as they did in Tasmania, to use overhead (power lines) rather than bury, that makes a significant impact on that capital cost.
If you’ve got access to ducts of not only Telstra, but other utilities, that can make a significant difference.
Ben: To put your quote of Telstra having to be a part of the solution, what do you say to that?
For the proposed NBN, in my view, Telstra has to be part of the solution, not the solution.
I chose those words carefully because Telstra having not only significant infrastructure right around Australia in terms of the copper plants, the ducts et cetera, but also because it actually does have fibre connecting all the exchanges right around the country, but also because it’s such a significant market participant, so it has to be part of the solution.
That can range from them being an investor in the NBN….potentially leasing some of its infrastructure… a whole number of options.
You can’t do something like this (NBN) and pretend Telstra don’t exist.
Ben: Did the Rudd government dream up a figure of fourty-three billion dollars?
I’d dispute that.
My response is that there is a broad basis for the number.
That goes back to….the various economic modelling that has been done in the public domain, but also a number of key consultants around the world including Ovum…who’ve done various examples of both capital and operational costs of NBN vs. FTTH.
Ben: Was there further analysis after your report?
I’m not aware of what further analysis they did subsequent to our work since the 21st of January…and I know they did further analysis.
Certainly the government has been doing a lot of work.
Ben: You guys didn’t come up with the figure?
No.
This is was what annoyed me particularly in Minchin’s statement…that the panel were not asked to evaluate the governments proposal…we’d been disbanded, we’d done out job.
I’m saying that figure is consistent with the sort of number that I’m…aware of coming out of a whole number of studies.
He’s (Nick Minchin) being the minister for opposition…I mean I guess he’s doing his job, if that’s the job specification.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd today announced 16 million dollars worth of investment for Gipps TAFE in Victoria as part of the Governments 1 billion dollar TAFE modernisation. The investment is said to help fund linesman training for the National Broadband Network (NBN).
In the Prime Ministers new hip way of announcing things, today through micro-blogging service Twitter, the Prime Minister announced funding for NBN linesman training.
Julia & I just announced $16m investment for Gipps TAFE @ Chadstone. Part of nearly $1b TAFE modernisation investment across the country.
Gipps TAFE helps train linesman to help roll out the national broadband network which will take 25,000 jobs for 7 years. Massive!
In today’s iTnews I spoke with one of the NBN expert panel members:
Nick Minchin, Shadow Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has told Tech Wired that he remains defensive of the Governments 42 billion dollar National Broadband Network after Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, addressed the Nation on Tuesday last week at the National Press Club.
Speaking at the National Press Club on Tuesday last week, Senator Stephen Conroy said that the opposition had failed to invest in Nation-building broadband infrastructure.
“We should not be surprised that the Opposition fails to grasp the importance of this nation-building initiative,” said Senator Stephen Conroy.
“After all, they failed to undertake critical infrastructure investment for 12 long years,” he said.
Speaking with a spokesperson for the Shadow Minister, Tech Wired was told that this was absolute nonsense.
“He (Senator Stephen Conroy) has promised us the world, but delivered very little,” the spokesperson said.
When asked if Opposition believed that Senator Conroy was copying them with the offering of wireless services for the 10 percent not included in the FTTP (Fibre to the Premise) build, they agreed.
“We took to the election to deliver wireless services for the last-mile,”
“Conroy is now building a model very similar to that of our, now scrapped, OPEL plan.”
Responding to Senator Conroy’s latest announcment of “fast-tracking” backhaul around Australia, Tech Wired was told by the Shadow Minister’s spokesperson that under their scrapped OPEL plan they would’ve rolled out a large amount of backhaul.
“Under our OPEL plan 15,000 kilometres of new back haul was going to be rolled out,” the spokesperson said.
The Shadow Minister himself, Senator Nick Minchin, told Tech Wired in a brief phone interview that he remained sceptical as to why the Government won’t release their report conducted by the expert panel as to why the Government brought forward the decision to build a FTTP network.
When informed about Tech Wired’s failed attempt at retrieving the NBN expert panel report under FOI (Freedom of Information) laws before the NBN announcement, Minchin said that he knew about it and was currently looking at possible ways to retrieve the report now that the announcement is complete and the Government continues to refuse access to it.
“We’re having a look at it,” Nick Minchin told Tech Wired.
“We’ll be looking at all the opportunities available in the Senate to get those reports,” he said.
“It’s pretty outrageous to abandon its (the Government’s) first policy and expect the Parliament to support it without any evidence,” he added.
His spokesperson told us that they believed the government was hiding something.
“The assumption we would make is that there is something to hide,” the spokesperson said.
The Government released all but a summary from the expert panel report, which we known consists of 913 pages thanks to the FOI application.
“They only released a 3 page extract that tells us bugger all,” Minchin responded in our phone interview.
When asked if the Opposition would accept the Government’s report if commercial interests were redacted, they said yes.
“If there is some particular part that needs to be blacked out, we don’t mind,” the spokesperson said.
The Opposition is also asking the Government to release coverage maps of where the FTTP network will be rolled out.
“We’ve called on them (the Government) to release coverage maps as we’re getting a lot of angst from rural Australia that they’re going to miss out,” the spokesperson for Minchin said.
Responding to Tech Wired’s request for comment, the Department for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy issued the following statement:
The Government has released the observations of the expert panel in an extract from the evaluation report.
The remainder of the expert panel’s report contains confidential commercial information so will not be released.
The ACCC report also contains confidential information.
The Minister has asked the Department to ascertain whether or not there may be aspects of the ACCC report suitable for release.
At CommsDay Summit’s 2009 annual dinner the industry decided that a consortium was most likely to win the tender for Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN).
With 34.1 percent of the industry deciding a consortium, a staggering 29.4 percent said nobody was going to win the NBN, suggesting a denouncement due next week from the Minister for Broadband Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy.
The results were formed from a survey of readers of the popular CommsDay newsletter and magazine, mostly of whom are staff members of Australian ISPs and equipment providers. Many other questions were asked including what the industry thought about Senator Stephen Conroy’s ISP-level filtering scheme. 48 percent of those surveyed believed the policy formed a new Orwellian state and that it should be abandoned, whilst 26.63% thought it was a policy that was well-intentioned but remained technically unachievable.
When it came to how the industry was dealing with the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) 44.1 percent said they were expanding into new markets, 28.6% were re-negotiating with suppliers and 17.8 percent were dealing with no crisis at all.
So if the NBN does in fact get built, what method of access will be used? That’s another question that was posed to the industry who favoured Fibre To The Node.
WITH the panel of experts’ report for the National Broadband Network tender complete; it’s crunch time. Read more
TELSTRA has failed to pass the five mandatory standards for the national broadband network proposal process by ignoring small and medium businesses.