Ex-NBN Co chief executive Mike Quigley has delivered a scathing assessment of Australia's National Broadband Network rollout and the technology behind it.
Mr. Quigley headed NBN Co for four years before resigning in 2013.
Speaking at the University of Melbourne earlier this week, Mr. Quigley's said his major beef was the departure from the original approach of Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) in favour of Fibre To The Node (FTTN) based on a Multi-Technology Mix (MTM) heavily dependent on old existing copper telephone lines - and how that all came about.
He maintains that people were misled about so-called cost blowouts of the original NBN and that an FTTP approach could have been completed on time and on budget. Instead, he said, the Government opted for a sub-standard project in terms of the future.
And FTTN hasn't been cheaper or much faster to roll out says Mr. Quigley. The original FTTP based NBN was forecast to cost around $45 billion. The MTM NBN will cost in the region of $46 - $56Bn; which Mr. Quigley says has nothing to do with the previous FTTP plan; nor the previous NBN management.
"To spend billions of dollars to build a major piece of national infrastructure that just about meets demand today, but doesn’t allow for any significant growth in that demand over the next 10 or 20 years is incredibly short sighted," he said.
"It is such a pity that so much time and effort has been spent on trying to discredit and destroy the original FTTP based NBN plan. And equally a pity that the Coalition has put their faith in what has turned out to be a short-sighted, expensive and backward looking MTM plan based on copper."
However, Mr. Quigley believes all is not lost.
"It is not too late to change the current direction of the NBN but of course that change would need to be made in a controlled and managed way to ensure the project is not subject to another major disruption."
Mr. Quigley stated FTTP is superior in terms of speed and capacity delivery, maintenance costs, reliability, longevity and upgrade costs.
In mid-June, Labor pledged to undo the NBN "mess" by stopping the rollout of FTTN once the current pipeline of construction work is complete and switching to FTTP. For those stuck with FTTN-based connections, a plan would be devised to transition these Australians to Fibre To The Premises.
The full text of Mr. Quigley's speech can be viewed here.
