The Coalition has now released its broadband policy and it is heartening that the Opposition has finally realised that high-speed broadband is an important infrastructure issue.
However, beyond the technological differences (which others have comprehensively dealt with elsewhere), the policy fails on one of the fundamental advantages of the NBN - ubiquitous bandwidth over a single wholesale network.
A ubiquitous fibre network provides business certainty for the private sector to build and deploy high-bandwidth applications across Australia, the Coalition's hodgepodge of technologies and last-mile monopolies does not provide this certainty.
Only vertically integrated businesses will have the ability to cost-effectively deliver applications across the network proposed by the Coalition - which is good news for FOX and Telstra but bad news for any other business looking to provide high-bandwidth applications.
It seems that the Coalition is keen to replicate the previous mistakes of digital TV and datacasting regulation that has entrenched the status quo in the broadcast sector - little wonder that the "fraudband" policy was launched in FOX studios.
