[LINK] New opposition spokesperson for broadband

[Richard Chirgwin]

Glen Turner wrote:
> Jan Whitaker wrote:
>
>   
>> ``Nick Minchin will take on the fraud that is Labor's broadband 
>> revolution,'' Mr Turnbull said.
>>
>> ``He will be there to take on (minister Stephen) Conroy and with a 
>> very powerful combination of experience in communications, finance 
>> and in regulation.
>>
>> ``Nick Minchin is perfectly equipped to take on Stephen Conroy and 
>> demonstrate the hollowness of this area of the government's initiative.''
>>     
>
> If you were to describe the proposed NBN as "hollow" it would be
> because it is installing a $5B network which will be inadequate
> within a decade and have huge maintenance costs (90,000 street
> cabinets) rather than dealing with the $20B nettle of fiber to
> the home now and reaping the longer network lifetime and lower
> operating costs in the future.
>
> What is also disappointing is Mr Turnbull's treatment of
> telecommunications as a purely political exercise.  We suffered
> strongly from this during Minister Alston's time in office. I
> do hope that attitude hasn't returned.  We'll see soon enough I
> suppose.
>   
As devil's advocate ... how accurate is any estimate, whether $5 bn for
FTTN or $20 bn for FTTH?

This report (warning: PDF) is interesting:
<http://www.broadbanduk.org/component/option,com_docman/task,doc_view/gid,1036/Itemid,63/>

The UK research, that it could cost as much as 40 billion *pounds* to
FTTH Britain, was sobering: the UK is smaller and denser, and that's
supposed to be good for fibre economics ... so is the research
off-the-wall, or is fibre far more expensive than we expect?

RC