October 2, 2009

This follows comments by the NBN chief executive, Mike Quigley, that it was too soon to say whether customers in the city and the country would pay the same price.  Meanwhile, Broadband Minister Senator Stephen Conroy says it is his “ambition” to have the same wholesale price for every household for the same speed.

“After two years, consumers are still in the dark about what the NBN will offer them and what it will cost them,” said Mr Hartsuyker. “We don’t know whether consumers in the city and in rural and regional Australia will get parity.  Even if the Minister realises his ambition of uniform wholesale pricing, we don’t know the extent of cross-subsidy that will be necessary and what retail price will result.  Once again, the Rudd Government is making it up as it goes along. We don’t know when the NBN will deliver services and we don’t know how much those services will cost.  They clearly haven’t worked out the economics of delivering the service to rural areas.

“We don’t know how many consumers will be prepared to pay the price for the speeds the system is supposed to be able to deliver.  It may be capable of delivering 100mb per second, but that will come at a price.  What is the point of the Government paying for a fibre-optic link into your home if you’re not going use the service?

“All we know is that the Rudd Government scrapped the Coalition’s broadband plan that would by now have been delivering services throughout Australia in favour of a $43bn turkey that, by their own admission, will not serve towns of 1,000 people or less and 2.2m Australians won’t get a fibre-optic link.  The Government needs to guarantee that regional consumers won’t be paying more than those in the cities.  It’s not a national broadband network, it’s a national broadband nightmare.”