I’m not much interested in politics but I happened across an open discussion yesterday with Stephen Conroy (Labor telecommunications minister) and Malcolm Turnbull (opposition telecommunications minister) and various industry identities.

It’s unfortunate that governments tend to be adversarial for the sake of being adversarial because between the two major political parties they could cobble together something worthwhile.

The national broadband network (NBN) that the Labour party are committed to rolling out is, in my opinion, a good thing for this country. Fibre optic cable to every home is going to provide us with a very scalable, low cost broadband infrastructure with, I would expect, a relatively long shelf life. The weakness in the Labour camp is the lack of a detailed cost analysis. The cost to taxpayers is in the order of 47 billion dollars. That’s a lot of tax dollars for a relatively small country. I do agree though, that it’s best for the government to maintain a degree of control over the core infrastructure. Telstra have shown time and time again that they will resort to just about every trick in the book to gain an advantage over the competitors that they provide wholesale services to.

The Liberal party have their own option and from a technical point of view it just doesn’t hold water. Whilst I haven’t spent a whole lot of time analysing their offering it seems that they think that wireless is ‘now’ and it would be better to keep us all on copper and/or wireless. The main issue I have with that plan would be that it is relatively short term. At some point in the next 5 years or so I think they would find that they would be back at the drawing board talking about the NBN again. Wireless is fairly limited on range and speed and copper wire also limits broadband speed. The further away you are from the telephone exchange, the slower it gets. I’m only around 1.5kms from our local exchange and whilst I am on a 20MB plan, the best speed we can maintain sync at is around 8MB. The Liberal party are doing everything they can to rubbish the whole idea of an NBN but I think there is one sensible part of their argument – and that is the cost benefit analysis. They have been (rightly, in my opinion) very critical of the lack of cost and cost benefit analysis that has been provided for the NBN. I think that when you are talking about such a huge investment of tax payer dollars then you have to be able to back that up with the numbers.

So, whilst I think the NBN is essential if we want to keep up with other tech savvy nations and future proof our broadband infrastructure, I also agree with the Liberal party – the minister has to back it up with some cold hard numbers.