Labor Roars While Liberal Snores
Labor Roars While Liberal Snores
August 22, 2007: Labor’s Shadow Communication Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy has lashed out at Liberal’s broadband plan, claiming it is me two politics and a poor attempt at that.
Shadow Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy has attacked the Liberal Government’s broadband plan and believes “Australia is in desperate need of broadband improvement”. The Labor party believes broadband offers enormous potential for the business community and everyday Australians and the Liberal plan “doesn’t go far enough” Senator Conroy told the AFR conference in Sydney.
The Liberal plan outlined by Communications Minister Helen Coonan involves a $600 Million wireless WiMax network with a series of transmission towers to act as hubs for wireless broadband in regional Australia. Senator Conroy believes this to be a complete waste of taxpayer money due to line of sight problems and small transmission distances. Supporting his case is the mixed signals coming from the Liberal camp with the minister’s department claiming the towers will transmit 50km wide, where as Optel who will actually be installing the technology are reporting only 20km transmission distance.
Another interesting feature of the Liberal plan is the $600 Million rollout has “coincidently been targeted at the 40 most marginal Liberal and National seats, which must have been complete coincidence” Senator Conroy continued “The Liberal plan is nothing but me two politics and it’s a band-aid solution at best”.
The Labor plan has the advantage in this tussle, as its minimum speed is 12mb/sec for each individual line. This means you will get a minimum of 12 megabytes per second (12mb/sec) on the Labor plan which is entirely your own line, the Liberal plan would see everyone in a 20km radius sharing that 12mb/sec line so the speeds would be far lower. The Labor plan would be financed with a mixture of government and private investment, with $4.7 Billion being the government contribution and the total costing coming in at just over $8 Billion.
Technology wise the Labor plan is using Fibre To The Node (FTTN) which would involve an extensive rollout of fibre cables to ‘Nodes’ in different areas of Australia. Conroy has outlined how the last leg of the network would extend from your business or home to the exchange over an ADSL2+ connection. This may sound similar to what broadband we have already, however ADSL2+ connections would be close to maximum possible speed on an FTTN network as well as faster connections to actual websites due to the faster network. “It’s like trying to fill a glass of water with a fat pipe or a sprinkler” Conroy explained “The fat pipe is obviously going to work better”.
Conroy’s attack focused on the liberal plan not going far enough to deliver the 12mb/sec connection to 98% of Australia that the Labor plan will do. On paper the Liberal government is actually able to claim that their plan to be rolled out by Opel can perform at “up to 12mb/sec” when in reality that is a shared connection by all users on the one node. When multiple users are sharing the line, access speeds would drop dramatically Conroy explained.
The industry point of view is one of mixed reactions, on the one hand organisations are happy to see government investment into new broadband technology, on the other this is clearly a case of election politics and the solution which gets the most votes may not necessarily be the best solution for the country.
To make matters more complicated, Telstra have tendered their own submission to build a FTTN network as has the Group of Nine (G9) group of telco’s, a coalition which formed in opposition to Telstra’s bid claiming it is anti-competitive. Not much is known about the Telstra proposal as they refuse to divulge the exact pricing of their network to the ACCC, though it is rumoured to be around $80/month for wholesale access. With access costs this high the average telecommunications company would have to pass on massive costs to the consumer which would make it unusable for anyone other then Telstra and hand them a virtual monopoly. The G9 has released a full pricing schedule which comes in at around $25/month for wholesale access to the network and would place control in an independent third party to promote competition and fairness.
Labor is welcoming the Telstra and G9 proposals as a valued addition to the broadband debate. After federal opposition leader Kevin Rudd “took the initiative to focus on our lack of broadband development, all of these proposals have come out of the woodwork. This is a good thing and I welcome it” Senator Conroy said.
Unsurprisingly the broadband debate has resulted into a series of mini-warfronts. On the one hand you have the Liberal versus Labor plan on the other you have Telstra versus G9 plans. It would be devastating for Australia to build competing FTTN networks so hopefully the pressure of an election year won’t see anything rushed that shouldn’t be.