Get your numbers right, NBN Co tells Economist
What’s a few million households between friends?
Ensure Ease of Recovery with Asigra’s Agentless Software
The Economist Intelligence Unit, which The Register had reason to criticize back in February, is still on the attack regarding Australia’s planned National Broadband Network.
Touting the latest edition of its nearly-$AU3,000 international broadband study, the EIU pulled out the “screaming red” headline stop, labeling Australia’s NBN as “the most extreme” example of government intervention in the world of broadband.
The outfit, which similarly panned the NBN in the last release of the study in February, says that at $AU27.1 billion and passing 7.45 million households, the network is the most expensive in the world on a per-household basis.
However, NBN Co, the company building the network, has fired back, criticizing the EIU’s data and assumptions. General manager of communications, Andrew Sholl, told The Register that the report is “mired in ideology”, and is making “no effort to whatsoever to understand why Australia is taking the approach it is.”
Scholl continued: “They also seem to have made the rather unfortunate error of mislaying several million homes and businesses.
“The authors … claim the NBN will cover 7.45 million Australian households; in fact, it will cover 13 million premises by the time it is complete. That puts a big question-mark over their assumptions.
“They also overlook the fact that Australia is more than three times the size of all the other top-ranked countries combined, that facilities-based competition in telecommunications has failed repeatedly here, that the NBN is already encouraging retail competition and even that the NBN will deliver a return to taxpayers.
“The report should be judged on its merits,” Sholl concluded.
Greens senator Scott Ludlam has also weighed into the debate, saying that "if the Economist Intelligence Unit keeps publishing these wild-eyed neoliberal rants they may need to change their name to something else".
The Register has invited a response from the EIU. ®
COMMENTS
Re: MDUs
I don't usually interject into the comments so much, but another explanation is required. Regarding apartments, the NBN Co preference is to go all the way to individual apartments, as is outlined in this document.
If an installation goes according to the design requirements, then the network boundary is at the individual apartments' network termination units (NTUs).
However, as I understand things right now, NBN Co can't force its way past the entry point to the building, so cooperation is required.
Richard Chirgwin
Miles and miles of bugger all
Australia maybe a tad on the large size, but in terms of where the population actually lives, well a huge proportion live in and around 10 or so cities - so the argument that it costs so much as it's a bloody big place does not stack up. I'll have to dig out the stats from wherever I found them, but Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world (in terms of where its population lives) after the usual suspect city states. Mind you, if I get a better service than I currently get from the incumbent telco, (AUS$120 a month for sometimes 8mb/s speeds and limited downloads), then woo hoo!
I also have a feeling that the $27bn is to the home... but I'll have to read the relevant docs again.
Differences: Households denote a family unit. So in other words, an apartment building contains many households but is a single premise.
The NBN will lay fibre to the *premises* (i.e., the buildings), not the the households (the individual dwellings within the premises). This is in the same way that Telstra (for example) is responsible for the phone lines *up to the premises*, but not once they've reached the building - problems between the outer walls and the actual phones is at the expense of the households.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
What you need to know about cloud backup
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything
Data control in the cloud
