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With a national election looming, government gives additional $1.9 billion funding to NBN fiber and tries to put its ownership on the agenda.
The Australian government has topped up the national broadband network (NBN) project with an extra 3 billion Australian dollars (US$1.85 billion), promising to make the network all-fiber by the end of the decade.
The extra cash, in the form of an equity injection into NBN Co., along with AU$800 million ($492 million) from the company, will allow 622,000 FTTN premises to upgrade to FTTP, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Monday.
When the upgrade is complete, 94% of premises on the fixed-line network – a total of 11 million homes and businesses - will have access to downlink speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s, he said.
The remaining premises would likely be upgraded through other technology solutions, offering speeds up to 400Mbit/s.
It's the third funding top-up for the NBN in the last five years. The Albanese government tipped in AU$2.4 billion ($1.5 billion) in 2022 to upgrade 1.5 million premises to full fiber in 2022, following on from an even bigger boost two years earlier from the previous government, which allocated AU$3.5 billion ($2.2 billion) to triple the number of FTTP premises to 6 million.
Public ownership
With so much government largesse involved, and a national election four months away, it is perhaps no surprise to find the NBN back on the political agenda.
The government has already attempted to make it an issue by introducing a bill guaranteeing the network will remain in public hands. The conservative opposition has opposed it.
But since the NBN was first proposed by a previous Labor government in 2008, the project has never been far from headlines.
Most notoriously, when the conservative government took office in 2013 it dumped the original all-fiber network in favor of what it called a “multi-mix” involving heavy deployment of copper and coaxial cable, claiming it would be faster and less costly.
It was wrong on both counts and as Albanese reminded a press conference Monday, the cost of the project spiralled from AU$29 billion ($18 billion) to AU$58 billion ($36 billion).
NBN Co became one of the world’s biggest corporate consumers of copper. According to its figures, up to October 2021 it had bought 61,000km of copper cabling, mostly to connect the new fiber to existing copper cabling.
NBN CEO Ellie Sweeney told journalists data consumed by the average NBN household had increased tenfold in the last decade, while the number of connected devices had grown from seven to around 22.
Over the next ten years that was likely to rise to more than 1.1 terabytes of data and 40 devices, she said.
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