Australia’s National Broadband Network Could Double In Cost And Take 10 Years More

Posted on Sun 03/24/2013 by PA Pundits - International

By Andrew Bolt ~

This should make you feel sick. The $37 billion the Gillard Government has bet on the NBN could soon seem small change:

The $37 billion National Broadband Network could be delayed by up to 10 years, according to a senior Melbourne academic.

On Thursday NBN Co … dropped its June 30 target of 341,000 premises connected to 190,000-220,000 premises, but the company maintains it is on track to complete the network in 2021 as planned.

Senior engineering lecturer at RMIT University, Mark Gregory, says he expects NBN Co to downgrade its targets even further before the end of the year, which would have flow-on effects for the overall project’s timing.

“If we continue down the path that we are going with external contractors doing the rollout, we’d expect [the rollout] could take five to 10 years longer than predicted,” Dr Gregory said.

”We should expect it to cost anywhere between 50 to 100 per cent more than before.”

What a terrible, terrible waste of public money. Horrific.

UPDATE

Even if the NBN, now way behind its targets, is completed by 2021, will this technology really still be state of the art? The image at right shows what a typical installation would look like in your home.

Does that look like the future?

Andrew Bolt is a journalist and columnist writing for The Herald Sun in Melbourne Victoria Australia.

Andrew Bolt’s columns appear in Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Adelaide’s Advertiser. He runs the most-read political blog in Australia and hosts Channel 10’s The Bolt Report each Sunday at 10am. He is also heard from Monday to Friday at 8am on the breakfast show of radio station MTR 1377, and his book Still Not Sorry remains very widely read.

Read more excellent articles from Andrew Bolt’s Blog . http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/