Minchin marshals survey results to attack $43B NBN plan

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 15 April 2009 11:14

Opinion and Analysis

The Federal Opposition has continued its assault on the Government's $43b NBN plan accusing it of ignoring, or selectively quoting from, studies that suggest customers will be unwilling to pay a premium for the promised high bandwidth services, but it risks exposing its own abysmal track record on broadband planning.

Shadow communications minister, Nick Minchin issued a statement today, 15 April, saying: "The Rudd Government has held up the Australian Industry Group and Deloitte Survey of company CEOs: High Speed to Broadband – Measuring Industry Demand for a World Class Service, released in October '08, to justify spending billions-of-dollars of taxpayers' money on broadband.

"The survey of 526 CEOs not surprisingly found that 85 percent considered the Internet highly important to their businesses and 66 percent felt they would benefit from faster broadband. However, the most salient findings were simply ignored by Labor, including that almost half (47.9 percent) of those surveyed said they would not pay a premium to access higher speed broadband.

"Just 25.8 percent of CEOs said they would pay a premium for higher speeds, while 26.2 percent did not know whether they would pay more or not. Also, almost 40 percent of CEOs did not know what their current broadband speeds were and just 17 percent believed faster broadband is likely to generate new products and services."

Perhaps Conroy should have read iTWire's report on this study before quoting it in support of his NBN plans, because we had serious misgivings about it when it was released, primarily because "a third of respondents had no idea of the speed of their current broadband service and none were asked to specify exactly what speed of service they were using." http://www.itwire.com/content/view/21276/1095/ Households.

Nevertheless, when the survey was released, Conroy said: "The High Speed to Broadband survey notes an urgent need for broadband improvement in Australia to support business growth and productivity." But, as iTWire pointed out, "The survey made no attempt to determine whether businesses are pushing the limits of what is available today, or simply ticking boxes in a questionnaire to express a vague wish-list of broadband requirements."

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