NBN: never been necessary

"We spent $6,000 per household over seventeen years and all we got was this lousy connection and the inspiration for 5 seasons of Utopia"

On 7 April 2009, Kevin Rudd announced the largest infrastructure project in Australian history. The occasion for the announcement was the collapse of the previous approach: a competitive tender process had just been terminated on the basis that no proposal offered value for money.

The government decided within hours that it knew best and proposed its own government-owned monopoly solution with no cost-benefit analysis or business case made . The project promised a fibre optic network to 93% of Australian premises at a cost of $43 billion to be finished in eight years.

"Just as railway tracks laid the foundation for the 19th century," Rudd told the press, "broadband is the core infrastructure of the new century."

Great line, but it hasn't aged well.

By 2013, when the Coalition took office, the FTTP rollout was already behind schedule and over budget. Malcolm Turnbull, as Communications Minister, announced the Multi-Technology Mix: a cheaper, faster alternative using existing copper and HFC networks. The new promised cost was $29.5 billion with a new completion date of 2016.

Neither of these targets was met, with the timeline slipping to 2019, then 2020 when the Morrison government declared the network complete after building significant parts of it with ageing copper that was degrading at 4-6% per annum. The declared final cost was $57 billion.

But it wasn't over. Next the Albanese government announced a plan to rip out all the copper connections after all - a process that is still ongoing. Some estimates place the total cost once (really, truly) complete at $70 billion.

If we had stuck with Rudd's original plan of a full FTTP rollout it would have been built for $50 billion. It would be a comedy of errors if it was funny.

The cost so far has been $57 billion - which is over $5,000 per Australian household. If the $70 billion estimate is correct, that pushes it to over $6,000 per Australia household.

What did we get for it?