Conroy says the cost of building the NBN could be less than $43 billion

The actual cost to build the National Broadband Network was expected by the Government to be “significantly lower than $43 billion” according to a recent statement from Stephen Conroy, the Broadband Minister.

Conroy stated that the element had a “substantial contingency” built in when he recently addressed the annual conference of the FTTH Council Asia Pacific in Melbourne.

There is also a possibility that a number of players may make the choice of buying into the project by offering existing network based assets, which the Government is allowing for, and it expects “substantial private sector interest”.

The duplicate cable network rollout by Optus and Telstra is one of the things that Australia should learn from and as such this allowance by the Government is a sensible one. The upgrading of its network to support broadband speeds of 100Mbps, which should be fairly inexpensive, has already been announced by Telstra and possibility that Optus will follow these plans is quite likely.

A great deal of the initial work on the NBN could be focused on the areas with limited or no broadband if either of these two networks were merged in the NBN as it would allow the Government to meet is promise of 100Mbps to a large proportion of the Australian populace both quickly and cheaply.

Many believe that cable broadband should not be seen as a stopgap measure and that its infrastructure should not have to remain as it is because greater speeds, especially for uploading, could be achieved with FTTH. Resolving the current open-access regime issue as quickly as possible is considered by many experts to be important at this stage and doing this would provide more focus on the issue.

Many participants will probably hold onto their existing ‘last mile’ arrangement as long as they can, although they will provide the NBN venture with their existing backbone links.

Words from a former Prime minister, Robert Menzies were called upon by Senator Conroy.

He quoted “When we begin some great national work of this kind, that is by common consent vital to the real industrial development of this country, we must accept some risks.”

He also added “We cannot be expected to work out in advance the rate at which we shall some day provide hydro-electricity… We should not start off with rosy ideas about cost factors, we must say to ourselves this is a great national undertaking. This is the kind of vision that the Rudd Government is applying to broadband.”