Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Hansard source

In many markets around the world where this issue of enhancing broadband services has been taken on, the more active trend is not to continue fibre-to-the-home rollouts in brownfield areas, other than in areas which are very affluent where there is a sense that you can generate adequate revenues—and that is essentially what Verizon did in the United States—but increasingly to deploy fibre-to-the-node. The reason for that is that it is so much cheaper because there are far fewer civil works involved, and we have talked about this many times.

The other point is that it is much faster. Some people have poor broadband services because they are on a RIM or because, while they might only be a kilometre away from the exchange as the crow flies, for reasons of topography—a river, a harbour, cliffs or something else—the loop of copper that connects their house to the exchange is very long, perhaps several kilometres. It might be four kilometres—who knows? In those situations, to say to those people, 'You will get a great fibre-to-the-home broadband, but it could take 10 years' is not much of a solution. Inevitably, as the next-generation 4G LTE wireless comes along—and it is being deployed now—it will so rapidly overtake fixed broadband connectivity that by the time fibre-to-the-home broadband comes along it may well be too late. That, of course, is why the NBN is trying to stop Telstra from promoting wireless as an alternative. In other countries, where a more rational approach is taken, incumbents are using a fibre-to-the-node deployment because they want to get in before LTE can seize their customers. Here, while that may not be the prime motivation, the key motivation should be building the solution quickly so that the honourable member's constituents get the broadband they need and get it in a timely way.

See this speech in context