This week Asher Moses, who is normally right on top of his subject matter, deliberately misrepresented the Coalition’s policy on NBN quoting Tony Abbott as saying 25 mbps will be enough for the average household and then going on to compare it with various other infamous statements about future technology requirements such as Bill Gates saying (allegedly) in 1981 that 640 KB of memory in computers ought to be another for everybody and DEC founder Ken Olsen saying in 1977 that “there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home”
Asher was quite dishonest in representing our policy in this way because he knows:-
* we have stated that most people in the wireline footprint would obtain speeds of 50 mbps or more,
* far from wanting to limit people to 25 mbps we have said that is a minimum and that by 2019 our goal is that 90% of premises in the wireline area will have at least 50 mpbps as their minimum.
* we have said repeatedly that we do not rule out much higher bandwidth being needed in the future and that a key element in our plan is to build enough flexibility into the network so that it can be upgraded to fibre to the premises if and when the demand is there.
* we have said that in addition to greenfield premises fibre will be deployed wherever there is commercial demand for it such as instititutions, schools, hospitals, universities, business centres and so on.
* moreover if someone in an FTTN area wants to have FTTP they can pay a premium and have fibre pulled to their house.
* the inference that 25 mbps is an inherently utterly inadequate level of service has to be reconciled with the fact that this is precisely the level of service proposed for those in remote and regional areas in the fixed wireless and satellite zones, people whose need for enhanced telecommunications is as great, if not greater, than anyone else in Australia.