The difference between the two plans

The two major parties are at odds over how much the country should spend to have better broadband connection. Underneath all the bluster, are their proposals so different?

No matter who wins the election on September 7, Australia's telecommunications networks will receive a long-overdue multibillion-dollar facelift funded by the federal government.

Australia has never topped global broadband rankings for speed and value. The OECD ranks us 25th in the world for fibre connections in its latest communications outlook report and Australia still has more dial-up internet connections than any other country in the OECD, apart from New Zealand.

There are differences - including network speeds, construction efforts, and using the Telstra copper network - but not as many as Labor politicians have been claiming during this campaign.
For example, Communications Minister Anthony Albanese claims towns will be ''divided by broadband'' and that ''planned [broadband] construction ... will be cancelled''. While NBN Co under a Coalition government might change fibre-to-the-home installations to fibre-to-the-node in years to come, the Coalition no longer plans to halt construction and sell off the network like it did in 2010.

Earlier this year the Coalition party room adopted the very un-Liberal policy of publicly funding a government-managed and real time Location system. This is because it can't unscramble Labor's omelet, and partly because it recognised votes were lost in 2010 when its broadband policy seemed to lack vision and did nothing to improve broadband speeds.

''It certainly was one of the things that affected us, definitely,'' says one Coalition frontbencher. ''Tony's [Abbott's] 7.30 Report interview was pretty bad. And the press conference with Andrew Robb and [former opposition communications spokesman] Tony Smith where they unveiled our policy was a debacle.''

The new broadband policy ''makes the best of a bad situation'' and the ''vast majority'' of Coalition members support it, he adds.The opposition's current communications spokesman, Malcolm Turnbull, convinced Tony Abbott the party needed a better policy. It turns out that policy will cost $30 billion, but at least the party can argue against accusations of being troglodytes.

Turnbull says his plan can be delivered sooner and at less cost with ''everyone in the nation'' getting access to minimum speed of 25 megabits per second [Mbps] by 2016 and 100 Mbps to the majority by 2020.

Turnbull says he still believes the best model is private sector upgrades done with ''judicious levels of government subsidy to make sure uncommercial areas are dealt with''. However, he has to live with the facts on the ground and work out how to complete the network that has been started.

''The gap between the parties' [policies] would be regarded outside Australia as being relatively modest ... what I have got to do ... is completely depoliticise this thing,'' he says in an interview with Fairfax Media. ''Our job is to open all the books, rtls, lay it all out and say, 'Ladies and gentlemen, this is where we are. This is the business you own. This is the position you're in. Here are our options for sorting it out.'''

Turnbull's policy adopts Labor's plan to raise tens of billions of dollars through government bonds, which keeps the project off the budget, and spend that money building networks that are available to all service providers at the same prices. Both aim to separate Telstra so its retail operations cannot benefit from it also owning infrastructure and evenutally privatising NBN Co to recoup costs.

"Very very similar"The Coalition's regional communications spokesman, Luke Hartsuyker, says both broadband policies are ''very very similar'' for the 7 per cent of Australia's population in regional areas that have been told to expect a fixed wireless or satellite connection.''We will maximise the value of the assets that we inherit. We will not be junking the work that has been done on ideological grounds,'' he says.

Albanese says the differences between Labor's NBN and the ''Coalition's lemon of an alternative couldn't be more stark''. He pointed to faster speeds, guaranteed upload speeds, free fibre installations and universal pricing.

''The Coalition's alternative relies on last century's copper, will be obsolete before it is finished, forces homes and businesses to pay as much as $5000 to connect directly to fibre, will result in regional Australians paying more for broadband than people living in the cities, and costs only 3 per cent less in terms of government investment than Labor's vastly superior NBN.''

There is certainty in Labor's policy that is missing in the Coalition's, partly because Turnbull wants to initiate three reviews if he becomes minister that could change his current rollout plans. Labor's NBN Co charges the same wholesale prices around the country, whereas the Coalition wants a regulated price cap that allows lower prices in viable areas. While Telstra's is settled under Labor's plan, the regulations surrounding NBN Co have stalled over concerns about cost and pricing into the future.

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