Coalition: Australians will get 12Mbps or more if they win

Liberals sprout on about "competitive competition" yet it was the Liberals who privatized Telecom (Telstra) and stunted Telecommunications in Australia for the last decade and half.

This is a load of rubbish. Services will still suffer because the incumbent Telstra, which is a creation of the Liberals, is still there.
12Mbps??? Not even 1.5Mbps is gauranteed. I have no doubt that I will still be stuck on a RIM infrastructure by 2020 with this load of rubbish proposal.
My vote goes to the NBN. I am sick of the Liberals hoarding the money and giving it away to the rich.

Actually - ADSL2+ is more than ample. Besides, the cost of $6B is much closer to what is actually required.

Anyone in industry will know that the $45B cost of NBN is a ridicoulus amount and about 10x what is actually needed to build a national broadband network.

However, the interested parties in NBN won't tell you this because they are in line to skim about $30B from us tax payers .... a big incentive to keep quiet and support everything the current govt says about NBN.

Problem with internet in Australia is not the speed to the home, but the high ping times and lack of backhaul to the rest of the world. Giving 100Mbps to every or 93% of households is not going to make us a more competitive nation. But wasting $40 billion dollars and trying to recoup this in higher taxes will make us a less competitive nation.The Coalition just need to address the broadband blackspot around Australia and let private enterprise provide the rest.

jb...telstra was sold as part of the recoup of the massive debt labour put the country in few years back which johnnie and costello took care of. There both as bad as eachother really but still think liberals would be the way to go for the tech industry...i agree with other part though...telstra is the cause and always will be the thorn in the tech industry's side.

Good to see the Liberals go with a platform that will be delivered.

What a waste of taxpayers money Labor's $40 -$100bn NBN is - for something that will probably never be completed.

Before Labor's NBN is even half completed I am sure Wireless will be well over 100Mbps !!

What a total waste of $6billion! This plan it outdated on paper, it was outdated back in 2006 when they thought the plan up and it will be a decade behind if it was ever to get rolled out. The current NBN is mostly future proof, as none of the fibre-optic cable being laid will ever need to be replaced/upgraded. Only the points of interconnect will need to be upgraded to faster infrastructure when we out grow 100Mbps. We have already outgrown 12Mbps and it is an absolute insult to be told by a lackluster Liberal Party that it is state of the art. Honestly if it was state of the art then the more advanced nations in the world would be using it yeah! But there is no one using the Liberal Party's planned network in the advanced nations, they are all using Fibre-Optic to the Homes. Part of the Liberal Party's plan is to put in more fibre-optic backbone, something that the Labor Party has been doing for the last 6 months and is continuing to do for the next 12 to 18 months.

this is a joke not a policy!
i'm a disappointed Liberal and disillusioned Telstra shareholder and hence will be voting for Labor's NBN

Thanks Liberals! The Liberal party is surely *the* most forward-looking and progressive political party in Australia.

I can't wait till the future arrives in my exchange and I can gloat about how fast my broadband is.

Oh, wait, scratch that, I already get 19Mbit on ADSL2+.

Did I say progressive? I think I really meant to say depressive.

I suggest the first reader comment be removed for its anti-semitic nature. I am not Jewish, but I believe comments like that are totally unacceptable.

Not sure is this discussion is about the relative merits of the major political parties or about the merist of a national broadband network.

singo79 makes some interesting observations about the merits of using fibre and future proofing. But it doesn't cost $40B to build it.

@st: Perhaps you need a course in physics to understand those "high ping times". The circumference of the earth is around 40,000 kms, and since most traffic travels to USA and back, assume a "ping" distance of around 40,000 kms (halfway there, halfway back). That's 133 milliseconds at the speed of light. And light travels slower through fibre-optic cable.

Do you expect the Liberals or Labor to somehow circumvent the laws of physics? The best infrastructure in the world can't overcome these kinds of physical limitations.

Would private enterprise have built the Harbour Bridge? And if it had, would the Bridge have had 8 lanes and two railway tracks?

The Libs continue to lose the plot.

How fast is a minimum peak speed of 12Mb/sec?
I somebody pulling my leg here?

The NBN will cost the tax payers ~$30 billion provided Telstra honours their part of the agreement.
It would not have cost that much to build if the Liberals did not off load Telstra but rather convert it into a full FTTH network before privatising it. They should have done that a long time ago.
For people to say that it is a waste of money because not everyone will need 100Mbps, the physical line will accomodate up to and beyond 100Mbps but the provider can throttle the speed down to 50Mbps if that is what the end user is willing to pay for. That way providers only have to provide/purchase an adequate amount of bandwidth.
Having a line that will accomodate at least 100Mbps makes sense because this ensure that we will have a scalable network for the future when speed demands hit 1GB and beyond.
The current Liberal Plan is a waste of money because these so called "Band Aid" solutions will only last a few years after and I highly doubt that wireless will provide a scalable solution for the majority of the population. Don't expect private companies to swoop in and save the day in the future too. We wil end up with a non uniform distribution of fibre equipped areas because of the unwillingness of private companies to commit to building anything unless they can make a profit.

Something people need to remember when talking about internet speeds is that it is only one side of the picture.
The proposed NBN alternative is a mixture of fixed and wireless services and according to my local liberal member, wireless will be heavily used in areas not already connected to a fixed service.
The problem there is wireless may provide a speed near fixed line DSL but is horrendously latent (the amount of time it takes data to get from your computer to the destination) and very suscepitable to congestion.
Wireless is a great secondary mobile service that the country needs but it is not and can never be a replacement of a tier1 fixed line fiber service.
I would love a FTTH connection that will provide LAN speed connections to work, can you imagine trying to do the same on a wireless or even slow DSL connection?

Another common comment is that its the international liks that make it slow so a FTTH solution will not help.
Keep in mind that a very large portion of the latency from an australian home pc to a US server is the point from the house to the australian side of an international link. Yes, international ping times are higher due to the distance invloved but a nextgen FTTH setup with a correct backbone setup will dramaticly reduce these issues occuring in our backyard.

To those who scoff at all this please goto a reputable source (not a political party) and reseach the advantages of the FTTH network. Wireless has its place but it is not the primary internet connection for home and industry.

The other side of the issue is cost. This is a valid argument but it boils down to what price we as a country put on the evolution of Australian communications. I personally feel that the price tag (and it is NOT 40b) is worth it. You may not but do not confuse the argument of cost with technical ability of the proposed network.

I am 3km from the exchange and have a ADSL2+ service. The peak speed I can get is about 5.4Mbit/s. I used to get a few Mbits more but the service is gradually declining due to additional users in the cable lowering the SNR and the degrading of the last 500m of cable due to age.
The NBN would easily meet my modest requirement of 20Mbit/s
The coalition plan of a minimum peak wireless speed of 12Mbit/s would be no better than my current ADSL2+. Even if the Libs plan provided OF to the node, what upgrades will be done to the last 500m of Cu which is where the network needs most work.

I still can't believe all this talk of the NBN.... assuming Labor win the election and this continues, how long will it take them to implement? It's heading towards 3 years now and all they have done is a few small networks, mainly in Tassie?

This is a government run operation we are talking here.... Private sector might take 10 years? Government maybe 25 years and 10 elections? This will never be complete before it is already outdated....

Wireless is the future, by the time NBN is done we would have had 4g/5g/6g and our humble little mobiles downloading almost as fast....

@J,
The length of the implementation is well known and the small networks are the pilot sites for the greater rollout. Work is being completed on new backhauls etc now and the tendoring process is underway for the full rollout.

As for being outdated before its finished, what are you basing this comment on? The fibre rollout will have the capability to massivly lift transmission rates and data flow as technology improves. The same cannot be said for wireless, I suggest that the cost of rolling out new wireless infrastructure everytime a new technology comes along coupled with the fact that radio transmission can never be as fast in both speed and latency than light means the 4g/5g/6g networks you mention will be the ones outdated before they are implemented.

@J,

I forgot to mention that this project is not just about mobiles or the home downloader, please try to think in the broad scale.

@david adsl2 is nowhere near fast enough for modern educational plans. It's the upload that's the sticking point. If it were 25mbps up and down, it would be barely adequate.
@lc Telstra was sold because the Libs were convinced that a company is more efficient if it's private (an idea put forth by Margaret Thatcher). This turned out to be untrue and has cost us dearly.

The bandwidth they are talking about for this plan won't be available till 2014, and it won't be complete till 2017.

The World Bank has stated that pulling out of the NBN is the worst economic decision possible for Australia. They anticipate an annual GDP increase of 1.5% from the NBN. That will make the $26 Billion seem like chickenfeed in the long run.
At the end of the day, the Liberals are seeming more and more the Party of the Luddites...

who cares what the government does... it should be the I.S.P's competing to be the best (service/price) among themselves like they have been

I don't think the issue is whether the NBN is better than the liberals wireless plans. You need to weigh up the proposed internet filter, the cost of the national broadband network and the fact that we urgently need to put money into hospitals. Alot of people already have internet access. What we really need to do is help the people on rims, dialup and regional areas and fill in the blackspots. It's not super fast internet, but at least people will have internet and thats what we are trying to achieve. The ability to do video conferencing, watch tv and movies on the internet is simply not more important than the need to build new hospitals. The NBN is far better and we are clear about that. But we do not want an internet filter and if we have to have wireless internet connections instead thats fine. The internet filter can be easily bypassed and we know that too. Wireless is no longer a dial up connection speed. We need to put the taxpayers money into hospitals instead as there are many people who pay tax and do not use the internet at all, but we all need hospitals and medical care and research. Lets not go spending crazy spending on fibre optic cables on every road when the cables under the sea to Hawaii and United States are not even upgraded. It doesn't matter how fast your connection speed is, it won't help you download any faster from overseas, or play online games any quicker. You can do many things on a wireless connection as well as a fibre optic connection. It's not the speed of the connection that matters, it's whether you have a connection at all. Will be a close election.

@sarah - Just so you know, the internet filter is now dead in the water (hooray!). Both the Libs and the Greens are against it, which means it won't go through no matter who wins.
High speed broadband allows for much more than you know...
1. Realtime interactive video so that doctors can diagnose remote patients immediately.
2. Increased education for everyone everywhere. You will be able to attend University from home.
3. Reduce much of the money wasted on tranportation. For example, in the US, 34 million people telecommute to work at least parttime...that's expected to double in the next few years. If we can get our telecommute workforce up to even that 10% level, we could save billions in petrol costs alone.
4. Telecommuting increases productivity of employees by 20-40% according to just about every study, and it saves companies a lot on office space as well as making it much easier for them to entice high value talent from overseas.
5. The increase in taxes from the predicted GDP increase (predicted by the World Bank) will add to the direct income from the wholesale revenue, making the NBN a very cost effective measure.
6. What everyone forgets is that the big bonus of the NBN isn't the download speed, it's the UPLOAD speed. This is what makes interactive video communications possible (which it isn't with the wireless)

you know if you're lucky enough to get adsl2 now, you're ahead in line for the private sector to upgrade your exchange hence speeds of at least 50mbps+. telstra already have laid some 100mbps connections in melbourne. the thought of the govt building the nbn and paying telstra $11bn was just too good for them to pass up. maintenance would cost double that too.

with incentives, the private sector would build at least 100mbps backbone to the nodes. in fact might even be cheaper for govt to build fttn, and get private sector to connect the last 5kms to home.

nbn is good but there is enough competition to build it. they just need a cow prod to get them to do it and hopefully these incentives would help.

forgot to mention, this project should really be split into 3. connect fttn, connect essential services ie hospitals/police/schools and lastly the consumer. problem with this is the money is made when selling to consumer. but this way, there is priority on who gets connected first.

I worked in the IT area within an eductational institution. They recently purchased hd video conferencing equipment and a high speed internet connection (AARnet ). What a waste of cash!
Its hardly used, and when a teleconferences does happen, its usually done with Skype and far end users on a home connection, it transfers the same info only slightly fuzzier for a fraction of the cost. I saw the same thing on Insight last night, a live cross to someones home via Skype. Why buy the a rolls royce when a commodore will meet your needs?

Sam, the "commodore" you speak of is clapped-out and is destined for the scrap yard. The Libs' proposal is nothing more than a set of mag wheels. For that matter, why bother with the commodore? My great grandad got by just fine with his horse.

This country will remain in the technological backwaters as long as Howard's Telstra monopoly remains. The Liberals will never structurally separate Telstra because they are obliged to look after all the mum and dad investors they SUCKERED into buying shares. They seem to forget Labour's original plan was costed around the same as the Liberal's new plan until the Telstra monopoly got in the way making the entire plan unworkable and impossible.

@Jason and TuffGuy, both sides of politics are equally responsible for the Telstra monopoly mess.

Keating corporatised TA into Telstra with the present structure, and then Howard sold it like that.

What on earth were they thinking?

The NBN will NOT be direct fibre to the home - each will be split to about 32 homes... so max will be about 78Mbps. By the time this is all built, wireless could have been faster and as the Liberals have planned, competition would have expanded on the fibre "backbone" to deliver fibre speeds to whoever wants to pay for it. Labour is feeding it's fat cats and mates with this ridiculous cost for the NBN! Build the backbone fibre network, upgrade the exchanges and away we go! We are not that far behind the world. Just go to Speednet listing to see we are even in front of the UK and even Singapore right now! We are No. 34, the US is No. 29... out of 181.