fibre-to-the-node

Turnbull is the driver of the NBN 鈥榯rainwreck鈥

If the National Broadband Network (NBN) is becoming a 鈥渃alamitous train wreck鈥, as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull claimed on October 23, then the fault lies with him.

He was the minister for communications in the Tony Abbott Coalition government who, in 2013, oversaw the disastrous decision to fundamentally change the NBN from Labor鈥檚 fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) model to a technologically obsolete fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) system. At the time, Abbott apparently wanted to 鈥渒ill the NBN鈥 entirely.

Turnbull's NBN: slow, expensive, delayed

鈥淭urnbull's NBN in crisis鈥, blared the front-page headline in the February 29 issue of The Sydney Morning Herald. "Malcolm Turnbull's cut-price National Broadband Network is facing mounting delays and rising costs, according to a damning internal report obtained by Fairfax Media," the article said. Fairfax revealed that the report, labelled 鈥渃ommercial in confidence鈥 and 鈥渇or official use only鈥, details a litany of problems in delivering the Coalition's supposedly more budget-friendly fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) model.