Australian National Broadband Network project

Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) was intended to bring high-speed fiber-optic internet connection to near 100% of country’s population. In addition to bringing the nation to a forefront of today’s technology with all associated benefits, the fiber-optics superior bandwidth capacity would not be saturated for decades while transmitting and receiving equipment could be upgraded practically indefinitely at low cost, allowing the NBN to keep pace with the demand for higher data rates. Thus might be a truly adaptable system if proceeded as envisioned. However another external factor (political) intervened. The change of government led to scaling the project down. The new plan is to deploy fiber only to new developments while remaining clients would be served by bringing it only to curbside nodes. Existing copper-wire pairs will cover the so called “last mile”. Copper does not have the same capacity as fiber. Moreover, due to electrical properties of the metal, signals distort and weaken considerably with distance. This creates bottlenecks in the system. Future upgrades to a fully fiber-optic network will be much more costly.