Over 10 years ago, the then Labor government undertook a major project for Australians to be part of the digital economy and help connect every household and business to the Internet via fibre optic cable. They set up a massive public company (NBN) to run the project.

The Coalition then won government and said it was too costly and dumped the fibre going back in time to use the existing copper network. They spent almost 12 months doing a cost benefit analysis and gave it a new name called MTM. Sold as being a Cheaper, Faster and More affordable service it was sure to be a winner and offered minimum 100Mbps to be rolled out to all Australian by Jun 2016.

Technically rolling back to copper can never be as fast as fibre, but in politics you can always promise one thing but deliver far less. You just cover it up spin and lies and get a new NBN CEO to cover your tracks.

So here we are in 2017, the cost of the project has more than doubled, rollout is massively off-tracck and we have a sub-standard NBN that is performing worse than ADSL was in 2007.

The CEO of NBN Bill Morrow is trying hard to convince people that we really don’t need high speed internet in Australia, so people should not complain about the speed. He goes to great lengths to defend the poor performance of the network. He argues that people are not signing up to higher speeds, so they don’t need them. What he neglects to say is that people are not signing up to 100Mbps or even 50Mbps because most of them can’t even get 25Mbps which is the minimum speed needed to be called “Broadband”. But Bill Morrow wants you to sign up to 100Mbps even though you will only get no more than 10Mbps.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who is responsible for the mess now says the NBN is a failure and a waste of money. By saying this, he is also stating that its a waste for Australians to participate in the Digital Economy.

What was promised as was Cheaper, Faster and More affordable is now a complete failure and a waste of money. If you are one of the lucky ones who has NBN, at say 50Mbps, you are doing well. If its not rolled out in your area, then the future does not look good.