Assistant Minister for Finance Dr Peter Hendy and Malcolm Turnbull laying NBN infrastructure, the multi billion dollar project that is now under increased scrutiny. Supplied.

When then-Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull launched the Coalition’s version of the National Broadband Network (NBN) in 2013 he promised fast broadband speeds at a value for money price.

It wasn’t as ambitious as Labor’s proposal — if NBNs were supermarkets, the Coalition’s plan was more Aldi than David Jones — but it promised the vast majority of Australians fast internet speeds in a quicker time frame than Labor and for less money.

But with construction costs up by more than $10 billion and allegations the rollout is painfully slow, the NBN is becoming a digital millstone weighing the Prime Minister down.

Shadow Communications Minister Jason Clare said the Coalition’s NBN was now in such strife that, “this mess is going to haunt the Prime Minister as evidence he can’t be trusted.”

But Communications Minister Mitch Fifield, who has taken over the NBN reigns from Mr Turnbull, has hit back and said the project has met its rollout targets and under Labor, it was one of the “most poorly managed projects in the history of the Commonwealth”.

National Broadband Network under construction. Supplied.Source:News Corp Australia

‘SAVE MANY BILLIONS OF DOLLARS’

On Monday, NBNCo, the Government organisation tasked with creating one of Australia’s most ambitious — and at $46 billion, one of its most expensive — pieces of infrastructure, was forced to deny claims the project was heavily behind schedule.

According to Fairfax Media an “internal progress report” said the project was two-thirds short on its benchmark construction timetable, and had only approved connections to 663,000 premises, rather than the 1.4 million planned.

In a statement, the NBNCo said it had met or exceeded every key target for six quarters in a row. This included having 2.6 million homes “ready for service” by year’s end, one million homes using the network and more than $300 million in revenue.

The company said it would not be drawn on “alleged internal documents” but admitted, “this is an incredibly complex project unlike any infrastructure build anywhere in the world.”

The squabbling over how many homes have been connected and how much the project has cost is all a long way from the Coalition’s glittery launch of its NBN policy in 2013.

United on a Sydney stage, then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Mr Turnbull promised that the Coalition’s version of the NBN would, by this year, deliver minimum download speeds of 25 megabits per second, possibly as much as 100mbps, for just $30 billion. Hardly the kind of coin you find down the back of the sofa, but significantly less than the $44 billion Labor was predicting their system would cost.

“There will be billions of dollars that Labor has wasted that we cannot recover but we will save many billions of dollars, at least $60 billion, by taking the approach we have described,” said Mr Turnbull at the time.

Labor’s fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) proposal would take that fibre all the way to the home while the Coalition’s cost saving was to be made by cutting back on important chunks of infrastructure. Called fibre-to-the-node (FTTN), Turnbull’s NBN would see the fibre cables — a veritable motorway of data — halting on the street corner. The last leg would take all those tunes, films, images and Skype calls down the picturesque side road of the more limited copper network.

Shadow Minister fro Communications said the NBN was a “ mess that will haunt the Prime Minister”.Source:News Limited

‘YOU’D GET THE SACK’

The downside of the Coalition’s plan was slower downloads. But, said Mr Turnbull, that needn’t be an issue.

“It’s not a question of what is your headline speed, it is what can you do with it and the substantial majority of people in the [FTTN] footprint will receive 50 megabits or more and that’s very high speeds,” he said in 2013.

But consumer organisation Choice said slower speeds would be noticeable. In a report last year, it said under Labor’s planned download speed of one gigabit per second, an average movie would take 30 seconds to download. The Coalition’s plan to force that same film through some copper wire would slow the download speed to, at best, a five-minute wait.

But at $46 billion, the cost of the Coalition’s cut-price NBN has now blown out to as much, or even more, than Labor’s “gold-plated” network.

Talking to news.com.au, Mr Clare said the project’s increased price tag was a damning indictment of Mr Turnbull’s time overseeing the NBN.

“In the private sector if you blow your budget by 100 per cent you probably wouldn’t get promoted, you’d get the sack.

“By any objective this is a massive mess and the Prime Minister has no one to blame but himself,” he said in Parliament earlier this month.

Minister for Communications, Mitch Fifield said the NBN under Labor “was one of the most poorly managed projects in the history of the Commonwealth”.Source:News Corp Australia

POORLY MANAGED

However, Mr Clare was cagey over whether Labor would return to their previous NBN plans, saying that detail would only be released prior to an election. He also wouldn’t speculate on how much Labor’s NBN proposals would now have cost given the original $44 billion budget was expected to increase to more than $70 billion — although somewhat less than the $90 billion the Coalition had at one point estimated.

On Monday, Mr Fifield rubbished Labor’s claims and said the NBN was set to meet its targets for the financial year and within the budget as set out in the company’s corporate plan. “Any suggestion to the contrary is just wrong”.

He said this was in “stark contrast” to the situation under Labor “when the NBNCo failed to meet every rollout target it set itself.

“The NBN under Labor was one of the most poorly managed projects in the history of the Commonwealth. For Labor to tell communities they would have had NBN sooner under them is simply wrong.”

Labor’s plans would cost at least $30 billion more that the Coalition’s, he said, and would take six to eight years longer to roll out.

As the creator of Australia’s current NBN, Mr Turnbull may be hoping Australians begin enjoying faster downloads sooner rather than later and forget the tortuous journey it took to enjoy that latest Oscar-winning motion picture in the comfort of their homes.