NBN should be upgrading everyone's internet connection to newer technology to ensure everyone gets fair access to broadband in Australia, a parliamentary committee has argued.
The original plan for the National Broadband Network in Australia was for 93% of Australian premises to have their connections upgraded from copper ADSL connections to fibre right into their homes or businesses.
When the Coalition government was elected in 2013, the government-owned NBN rollout changed from majority fibre-to-the premises (FTTP) to what then-communications minister Malcolm Turnbull referred to as a "multi-technology mix" using existing cable and copper connections with fibre installed right up to a "node" on the streets – keeping the existing copper connection for the majority of homes and businesses.
Turnbull has argued that this was to bring down the overall cost for the NBN and roll it out faster, but what was originally suppose to be a $29.5 billion rollout has now blown out to $49 billion, and the network construction that was due to be done last year now won't be completed until 2020.
The new version isn't anywhere near as fast as a full fibre connection, but the government and NBN has argued that most people on the NBN won't use higher speeds anyway, with 54% of all users on a fixed-line NBN connection choosing the 25Mbps speed tier and just 17% of users choosing either a 50Mbps or a 100Mbps speed tier.
We are now at the halfway point of the construction of the network. As of the end of June, there are 5.7 million homes and businesses able to connect to the NBN, and 2.4 million premises connected and accessing the internet on the NBN.
The majority of those connected to the NBN are now connected via the Coalition's preferred technology choice, fibre-to-the-node.
NBN's own modeling released in May 2017, however, reveals that at least 6% of homes on the fibre-to-the-node NBN can't get more than 25Mbps download speeds – the bare minimum the government has promised to offer – and just 32% have access to speeds of up to 100Mbps.
In a report released last week, the parliamentary committee responsible for overseeing the NBN rollout has called for NBN to abandon the fibre-to-the-node technology and switch to relatively newer technology called fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC).
This involves extending the amount of fibre in every home connection right up to the driveway of a premises and then using the existing copper. It can result in much higher speeds, but doesn't cost quite as much as the full fibre experience.
People who do want to upgrade their connection to the full fibre can do so at their own cost, but the committee has said that this creates a divide of haves, and have nots that undermines the reason for the NBN rolling out in the first place.
"While NBN has outlined the framework they are working from to be able to deliver an upgrade as the market demands it, this 'user pays' approach runs the risk of creating a digital divide in which low socioeconomic areas with poor NBN are not upgraded because the demand and matching revenue will not meet the NBN upgrade model," the committee stated. "As it stands, Australia will not be provided with a fast, affordable, ubiquitous, and fair broadband network."
"The committee recommends that the Australian government direct and enable NBN to complete as much as possible of the remaining fixed line network using FTTC at a minimum (or FTTP), and require NBN to produce a costed plan and timetable under which that would be achieved."
NBN is currently only planning to connect 1 million out of the 12 million Australian homes via FTTC.
NBN CEO Bill Morrow told the committee in August that the company had conducted a study on whether many more homes in Australia could get an FTTC connection but it was rejected by NBN's board and the government for being too expensive.
"It was far more than what we are currently spending at today, so the commitment of, 'Wait a minute, that deviates from the statement of expectations' – if you could do it today cheaper, faster, meeting the needs of the majority of Australians and have an upgrade path when those needs increase, that is what you're supposed to be doing, and hence we're on this track to do so," he said in August.
"But as soon as you want to do this richer fibre before people are willing to pay for it, the economics fall apart."
In what is a strange outcome for a parliamentary committee, the chair of the committee, Liberal MP Sussan Ley, had to issue a dissenting report on behalf of government MPs on the committee refuting the claims of the rest of the committee.
She said that when the rollout is completed in 2020, then 9 out of 10 homes and businesses on the fixed line network will have access to download speeds of at least 50Mbps, and NBN has an "upgrade path" to provide speeds of up to 500Mbps "as demand emerges".
The demand, she suggested, wasn't there yet.
"The reality is that, aside from a few niche products (that are largely focused on video streaming and related entertainment applications) there are currently few products or applications that require speeds higher than 25 Mbps," she said.
Labor is suggesting the government is now divided on this issue because Victorian Nationals MP Andrew Broad did not sign the dissenting report with the rest of the government members of the committee.