Australia's National Broadband Network Downgraded 122
RobHart writes "Following election promises to create a 'better, cheaper, sooner' National Broadband Network (NBN), the new Australian government has reneged, announcing instead the NBN will cost $12bn more and take four years longer. The critical change is that the new network is based on Telstra's aging and unreliable copper network rather than fiber to the home, as has already been delivered during the NBN roll out to date."
In between. (Score:2, Informative)
The answer lies in between. Politicians promise large projects [wikipedia.org] and underestimate their cost. They hire the lowest bidder, and the talent running the project is not cream of the crop because that would cost more. The government also has very little competition for large scale projects, so if the project isn't going well, we can't exactly bring in someone else to take it over, like an individual would if a plumber they hired was incompetent.
Public-Private Partnerships [wikipedia.org] seem to work address a lot of these issues. Expect to see more of them in the future.
Re:Not sure which is news... (Score:5, Informative)
The whole point of the NBN is that it's a government chartered corporation that leases access to everyone.
It was never about the "free-market".
Instead, the idea was to create a competitive market, on a government built foundation instead of the existing private monopoly/oligopoly.
Infrastructure investments are almost always worth it, even if the price explodes.
Re:Not sure which is news... (Score:4, Informative)
Australia is the opposite of South Korea in this respect - it's a massive place with low population density.
Australia's a bit deceptive in this... there are massive areas where no one lives, which would not need any connections. I guess it's a little like Canada, in a way. If you just take the land area, and divide by the population, you get big numbers. However, those numbers aren't all that useful in figuring out how costly it would be to get broadband to a certain percentage of the population, since no one lives in 90% of the area.
Also, South Korea is only a little bit smaller than England, with a little bit smaller population. England's broadband is not close to South Korea, despite being a first world western nation.