NBN: The long toll road to nowhere

Unless the NBN plan business case is produced and justified the Government’s NBNM budget assumptions hold far less validity than the Opposition’s electoral budget which had a relatively modest hole in it of maybe $7 billion, compared to the $43 billion equity and debt that the NBNM is projected to cost.

How should the government proceed?

Build the highways where highways are needed, build smaller (or slower) side roads where they should be.

There must be appropriate infrastructure available to achieve appropriate download speeds that are applicable for ordinary folk to use.

The overdesign could makes mugs of us all if, say, Singapore Superannuation funds buy the NBN at a low price in the future due to the overdesign and the unknown business plan.

What’s more we are junking existing road systems to put this new freeway in place.

We are making obsolete the still functioning copper network and not utilising availablewireless or copper/optic hybrids.

We are not clever country at all!

Outcomes, justifications and original intent often don’t make sense when looked at retrospectively.

Could it be that we are being sold an outcome, being fed a part justification but that the true intent has been hidden from us?

And can we see the hand of self interest in the IT cheer squad’s support for the government’s plan?

Could the ultimate intent be the re-establishment of the postal monopoly in the digital age with the equivalent of an “email stamp” for each email?

Could the National Broadband Network business plan be achieved by increased prices as fee for service using monopoly power? If so we might really be bigger mugs than anyone could have imagined.

That would be the ultimate user pays. And Pays. And Pays.

Now what is the probability of that?