The Coalition’s long-awaited broadband policy will use government funding to leverage a privately run high-speed network to deliver  12-100 Mbps to 97% of households, using a combination of existing HFC cable, DSL and fixed wireless.

The cost will be $6.315 billion over seven years.

The policy will be based on a $2.75 billion “nation-wide competitive fibre optic ‘backbone’,” involving both public funding and leveraged private investment, to provide two back-haul fibres with an open access regime. It will also try to prioritise regional areas through specific spending on a $750 million Fixed Broadband Optimisation program to provide DSL services or high speed equivalents, a $1 billion grant program for fixed wireless networks in rural and remote Australia areas and a  $1 billion investment in fixed wireless networks in metropolitan Australia, with an emphasis on outer metropolitan areas.

A further $700 million will be spent providing satellite broadband services to the final 3% of communities, and there will be limited regulatory changes to enforce competition and access to the back-haul fibre. A new bureaucracy, the National Broadband Commission, will be established to implement the plan over six years.

The Coalition plan will rely heavily on upgrading existing infrastructure and wireless broadband, despite the vulnerability of wireless to speed degradation due to traffic and distance issues.

At a difficult press conference this morning, Opposition Communications shadow Tony Smith, flanked by Finance spokesman Andrew Robb, was repeatedly pressed to explain what proportion of households would have access to what speed levels and repeatedly refused to do so, insisting that was a matter for the market to determine. The only commitment Smith would provide is that households would receive speeds between what they already have access to and up to 100Mbps, and that outer-metropolitan and regional areas would be prioritised.

Comment

The Coalition broadband policy talks a lot about competition and the vibrant spirit of the private sector versus the dead hand of government, but it is confusing and transfers responsibility for broadband roll-out back to the market, which failed to deliver it for so many years — albeit with government funding intended to “leverage” investment in core parts of the network.

Tony Smith came under constant fire from journalists this morning for being unable to explain how many households would receive what speeds. He was, he insisted, making no apologies for leaving that to the market.

The other reason, which he didn’t mention, is that the mix of technologies the Coalition says will do the job for it won’t come close to providing 100 Mbps.  Wireless has been adopted by right-wing economists as their preferred technology, presumably because it is seen as some sort of rival to a Labor government’s broadband roll-out, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Barring some changes in the laws of physics, wireless won’t provide the sorts of speeds the NBN will unless you’re sitting at the base of the tower and you and the little old lady across the road are the only ones using it.  Similarly, upgraded HFC cable, which the Coalition plan also relies, won’t match NBN speeds.

Robb insists there’s no need to — where people want to pay for 100Mbps, it will be provided by the market.

That may well apply in capital cities. It’s a problematic assumption everywhere else, particularly if there is no single provider guaranteeing, as NBN Co does, that it will be able to provide similar speeds to 93% of the population. Metropolitan broadband services will continue to be vastly better than regional ones.

The Coalition, as Smith noted today, remains implacably opposed to the structural separation of Telstra, meaning the role of the dominant telco under the Coalition broadband plan will have to be hedged in with yet another round of regulatory changes to strengthen the hand of the ACCC. That’s a guarantee that infrastructure access will continue to be negotiated through the courts and lawyers, rather than on simple business terms.

Such was Robb’s emphasis on the importance of services in outer-suburban areas — at one stage he conjured the image of tradies needing to check their iPads — that the policy can best be described as a reheat of the Howard government’s OPEL project, rolled into the outer-suburban electorates that both sides are targeting in this election campaign.