In the race for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination, Senator Elizabeth Warren recently proposed a government-provided broadband rollout across the United States to compete with or supplant the existing private ISPs. Arthur Chrenkoff suggests that looking at Australia’s experience with a very similar plan might encourage her to abandon her proposal after a brief airing on the campaign trail:
Senator Elizabeth Warren speaking at the Iowa Democrats Hall of Fame Celebration in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on 9 June, 2019.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.
Maybe Senator Warren should have a pow-wow first with IT experts from Australia, who could enlighten her about our country’s 12-years-and-counting saga of the National Broadband Network, a Labor government initiative that the -then leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, described as “a white elephant on a massive scale” but later adopted and continued while in government.
It started in 2007 as a policy for a government-rolled out broadband network, in most areas duplicating internet services already provided by private sector providers (mainly through the existing copper wire telephony network), which would be available as an option to all Australian households. In most cases it would be achieved through wired technology (fibre to the premises, later downgraded to a cheaper fibre to the node) with a satellite connection available to the most remote areas where cabling was impractical.
I remember thinking then that the project was an absurd waste of taxpayers’ money for a service of the type that telecommunication companies would be able and willing to provide in any case. At most, there was an argument that the government could step in and provide the infrastructure in some country areas where there was no commercial case for the private providers to proceed. Call me a clairvoyant but it was pretty clear to me that “broadband for all” would take a lot longer to roll out that planned, would cost significantly more than initially budgeted, and would very likely be technologically obsolete by the time it was finished.
