NBN: never been necessary

Here are internet speeds by country in 2026, with Australia coloured a lovely shade of mid-green only slightly darker than parts of Africa, Russia and South America. Our connection speed is 164 Mbps on average - that's 2.5 times slower than Singapore where inhabitants enjoy 407 Mbps. In the rankings we're sitting at number 43 below Vietnam, Romania and Peru. The average Australian pays $85 a month for this, while South Koreans are watching 8K video on connections faster than most Australian businesses can access.

Meanwhile Elon Musk and SpaceX have built a global satellite broadband network that runs with an average latency of 31 milliseconds. The NBN's satellite service runs at 663 milliseconds. In 2025 Musk suggested Albanese's most recent injection of equity into the project would be better spent elsewhere.

Elon Musk@elonmusk

Doesn't seem to make sense

Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt

NEWS: $3.8 billion will be spent to upgrade 622,000 homes in Australia with national broadband network Internet, costing ~$6,100 per house. The retail cost of a @Starlink router is $549, with a monthly service fee similar to an NBN plan, but Starlink internet is up to 4x faster.

4:50 AM · Mar 14, 2025 · 19.1M Views

11.8K Replies · 15K Reposts · 88.1K Likes

So yes, it is hard to argue that this boondoggle from 2009 has not been a catastrophic failure from beginning to end. It's a classic "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" moment.

What would the market have delivered by 2026 if the government hadn't cleared the field and handed NBN Co a monopoly? Nobody can say, but South Korea made different choices about market structure and competition and has 1Gbps fibre for the price of a modest dinner out.

The take-away is this: when a government entity builds infrastructure, there is no price signal telling it to stop spending. There are no shareholders demanding answers, and no meaningful consequences for cost overruns other than some uncomfortable moments in a Senate estimates hearing. In the case of the NBN, competition was made structurally impossible via the NBN level playing field provisions enacted in 2011, further removing access to vital information on the project's viability.

Every government project suffers from Hayek's knowledge problem: the NBN architects knew what they wanted to build, but what they didn't know was whether it was worth building, at what cost, using what technology and on what timeline.