Economist Intelligence Unit takes a dim view of Australia's NBN

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 09 February 2011 16:42

Opinion and Analysis

The Economist Intelligence Unit's ranking of Australia's National Broadband Network as being among the laggards has been seized on by the Opposition and by commentators as a damning indictment of the project, but all it really reflects is the EIU's view that public money should not be spent on such projects.

The EIU has published the first of what it says will be a quarterly Government Broadband Index assessing the role of governments in various nations' broadband activity.

It's hard to get too much detail on the EIU's thinking without shelling out a cool three grand for the full report. There's an eight page executive summary that is pretty light on and a five minute video interview with the leader of the EIU's telecomms team, Ian Morris.


The executive summary is less than reassuring about the quality of the EIU's research. It says of Australia "Australian authorities have taken control of the national incumbent's existing fixed network and plan to fund, develop and operate a national fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network, providing wholesale services on an open-access basis."

Australia is singled out for reprimand as "the country with the highest-profile and most controversial public-sector scheme [and which] falls in the bottom half of the index, mainly because it is spending a colossal 7.58 percent of annual government budget revenues on its National Broadband Network."

And to rub it in the EIU notes: "In South Korea, by comparison, the government is spending less than one percent of annual budget revenues to realise its broadband goals, achieving targets by encouraging the private sector to invest in the country's broadband future'¦Overall, the developed South-east Asian countries (Japan, South Korea and Singapore) are at the forefront of the move towards near-ubiquitous high-speed broadband. All three countries have official targets of providing 1Gbps services to more than 90 percent of households within the next two to five years."

Regardless of who is spending the money, it is far less costly to bring high speed broadband to a densely populated Korea than to Australia, but there is no indication that this hurdle has been factored into the EIU's rankings.

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