With the apparent admission from Malcolm Turnbull last Thursday evening on Lateline, that many Australians may have to wait years to receive the alternative broadband plan that the opposition proposes in place of the NBN, and that many may receive no upgrade at all, the fears of many telecommunications professionals may indeed become reality should there by a change of government in September.

Disparity.

Stopping the current rollout, renegotiating deals with Telstra and the NBN construction companies, changing existing laws to allow for the current NBN to suit the proposed new plan – and in the end, leaving Australia with a messy, heterogeneous network, built from a range of different technologies that will prevent many Australians from getting the services many others will be able to receive.

In other words, a solution with all of the same problems we have now.

Summing it up precisely was Twitter user Gwyntaglaw, who posted this comment on Delimiter:

“Here’s the vision splendid from the Coalition then.”

“Imagine your typical Australian city.”

“Fred, who is lucky to live in one of the suburbs to get NBN fibre in the earliest rollout stages, enjoys a range of affordable, high-speed internet plans over open-access fibre from a variety of providers. He’s so impressed with the capacity of the fibre that he’s now running his own business from home, able to upload and download large, complex files in a flash.”

“Janet, who lives in the next suburb along, has had FTTN activated in her exchange. There’s a great big new cabinet taking up half the verge nearby; but because of problems with water-damaged copper, she can only get a fraction of the promised “up to 50Mbps!” And when it rains, the service is pretty much useless. She’s asked about upgrades or fixing the wiring, or (she hopes) getting fibre instead, but everyone she speaks to in the know just lowers their eyes and mutters “sorry, we’re just trying to roll out nodes as quick as we can,” before hurrying away.”

“Percy, who lives one suburb over from Janet gets to look out of his apartment window at the Telstra cables. They don’t do him any good, because his apartment block isn’t connected, and he can’t find anyone at Big Pond willing to answer his call about when (or if) his apartment ever will be hooked up. He has a lame ADSL service which can get up to 5-6 Mbps download on a good day, but is fairly hopeless at uploads. He would like to be able to work from home, but the service is too patchy and unreliable to get much real work done – and disconnections are frequent.”

“This is pretty much what we’re going to get – a patchwork quilt. What is it going to do to those little islands of fast broadband, where the tech-savvy are going to want to move? What is it going to do to the vast majority of customers who are completely confused, baffled and frustrated by a system that makes no sense and is utterly haphazard and random about what kind of broadband you might be able to get?”

This is a perfect description of what Malcolm Turnbull’s plan will deliver. It will further entrench the so-called “digital divide”.

Some will “have”, and some will “have not”.

Despite claiming to be a progressive thinker with the best interests of Australia at heart, his plan will commit Australia to this non-sensical outcome for at least another 10 years – and maybe longer.

Can Australia really afford to be left behind all the other countries where advanced fibre networks are being installed?

Countries like:

“New Zealand, Qatar, Singapore, France, Canada, Kenya, South Africa, Brunei, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Phillipines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Mexico, United States, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Venzuela.”

…all of which on some level are initiating FTTP/FTTH solutions.

Do we want to be behind all of these countries?

I know I don’t.

Shall we allow Australia to lead the world for once?

The Coalition don’t seem to think so.

In appearance on ABC TV’s Lateline program last night, shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull appeared to suggest that under his alternative national broadband plan, 30 percent of Australians may not actually receive any kind of broadband upgrade as part of his plan.

“Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has confirmed that metropolitan areas of Australia in the HFC cable footprint of Telstra and Optus would not immediately receive the Coalition’s planned fibre to the node upgrade if it wins Government and did not commit to deploying FTTN infrastructure in those areas in the long-term.”

HFC cable has been deployed by Telstra and Optus in areas covering about 30 percent of the Australian population, providing coverage in cherry-picked areas in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane.

In many cases, Telstra built their HFC network in particular streets and neighbourhoods, for no other reason than because Optus had already covered those same locations, and it wanted to flex its monopolistic muscle to squeeze Optus.

If Optus hadn’t have built theirs, chances are Telstra wouldn’t have done so either.

There have been other HFC rollouts in Australia – notably TransACT in the ACT, and Neighbourhood Cable – (which was later purchased by TransACT) – in Geelong, Ballarat, and Mildura in Victoria. The combined TransACT/Neighbourhood Cable was then subsequently purchased by iiNet.

Austar – (now owned by Foxtel) – also deployed a small HFC network in Darwin.

So now that we’re stuck potentially only having a new – (and inferior) – network rolled out to 70% of Australians, how much will it cost?

“Although Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has been mum on definite costs, Citigroup Global Markets estimates that the coalition’s broadband plan would set Australian taxpayers back approximately $16.7 billion, and could be completed by the end of 2018.”

“If the Coalition wasn’t stuck with existing National Broadband Network (NBN) contracts, its network would only cost AU$15 billion, according to Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull made the comments during a debate with his government counterpart, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, on ABC1’s Lateline last night.”

Turnbull says it will cost $15 billion. Citigroup says it will cost $16.7 billion. Given Citigroup probably assumed Turnbull’s plan was to cover the same 93% of the population with FTTN that the NBN intended to cover with FTTP, lets give Turnbull the benefit of the doubt and call it $15 billion.

How would that price compare with doing the entire job?

Given $15 billion is to apparently cover 70%, 100% would cost $21.4 billion – (that’s 15,000,000,000 divided by 70 and multiplied by 100) – if the costs average out across the plan.

The current NBN plan is for $26 billion of government funding for 100% coverage, with the remainder of NBN funding to come from the debt market. If Turnbull’s plan were scaled up to 100%, it would cost around $21.4 billion.

Suddenly Rob Oakeshott’s claim that the Coalition plan might only save $5 billion sounds pretty much right on the money.

Of course, if you include the “If the Coalition wasn’t stuck with existing NBN contracts” jibe, it probably won’t be any cheaper at all.

The thing is, people have been telling Turnbull of the comparative failings of his plans for months and months, yet we know he won’t listen.

“Mr Turnbull declined to confirm or reject the Citigroup report’s findings, but used Twitter to describe it as “very ill-informed”. “Puzzled Citi would write this without speaking to us – file it in the fiction section,” he tweeted.”

“Worse, the money saved – Turnbull estimates $20 billion – can’t be spent elsewhere or used to bring down taxes, because it is capital expenditure, not operating expenditure.”

“However, there is currently no publicly available evidence that Turnbull is correct in his statement that the Coalition’s rival NBN policy would save the Federal Government billions of dollars in investment when it comes to its funding of the NBN project.”

“Pearson advised that although the initial financial outlay of an FTTN would be a lower as it would be a smaller network the cost to upgrade to an FTTP network in the future would make it substantially greater. Whilst speaking to the Joint Committee in Sydney on the NBN he advised “It is an important policy consideration that you really need to take into account if you are going to build a fibre-to-the-node network.””

So in a nutshell, basically nobody believes his plan will be cheaper, and now we find out 30% of the population might not get any kind of upgrade for the money anyway, whatever the final amount turns out to be.

Turnbull has long promised a better and cheaper solution for all.

Well, it’s not going to be cheaper – we already know that. We also know that it is certainly not better.

Even today, his plan has been described as ‘doomed to fail’.

It now may only be cheaper because maybe not everyone gets it.

The bottom line is, Turnbull simply doesn’t get it either.

Like much of the very small amounts of Coalition policy we have seen, it is all about three-year political cycles, and getting into office – and to hell with the consequences.

Australia deserves better.