The former head of NBN Co has criticised the recently announced plan to give millions of customers access to ultra-fast internet, saying it would have cost less for both the Government and customers if it had been done in the first place.
On Wednesday the Government announced the company would invest $3.5 billion to upgrade current infrastructure to provide 6 million houses with access to high speed internet of up to 1 gigabit per second.
The plan includes extending the network along street fronts in some areas and giving people the choice of whether they want to connect directly to the NBN.
While people will not have to pay a connection fee, they will have to upgrade their plans and potentially pay a higher price, depending on how fast they want their internet to be.
The company's founding chief executive officer Mike Quigley said the rollout should have been Fibre To The Premise (FTTP) from the beginning.
"The announcement by NBN Co yesterday confirms that when the Coalition placed a bet on using the old copper and pay TV technologies to build the NBN, they made a very big mistake," he said.
"They lost that bet.
"It's turned out to be much more expensive and much more difficult than was thought, and the performance is clearly not good enough."
Mr Quigley said claims the rollout and upgrade was a more cost-effective approach were wrong.
"It really isn't cheaper than it would've been, if you think about it," he said.
"If you build two networks in parallel, which is really what they're now talking about doing, it's a very expensive way to provide fibre to the premise.
"You've got to remember also there are companies around the world that bet on fibre to the premise at that time [prior to 2013], [and] they have got dramatic reduction in cost."
He said one New Zealand company had seen a 44 per cent drop in their FTTP bills.
"It is simply not true that it could not have been continued in 2013," Mr Quigley said.
The NBN has remained a politically charged issue since its introduction in 2009, when the then-Rudd government promised optical fibres direct to most homes and businesses.
The Coalition scrapped that policy when it won at the 2013 election, choosing instead to move to a model where the NBN was connected to nodes at the end of streets, with pre-existing cables used to pipe it into people's homes.
As a result, there is now a mix of technologies, including optical fibre, copper wires, Hybrid Fibre Coaxial (HFC), fixed wireless and satellite.
But of most concern to Australians are the slow internet speeds or difficulty connecting to the network in the first place.
NBN Co's current CEO Stephen Rue rejected Mr Quigley's claims, and said rolling out the network quickly after 2013 meant they had revenue streams coming in faster.
"In other words you're using cash flows from the business and reinvesting that," he said.
Mr Rue said the company had been thinking about its upgrade pathways for the last two years or so and decided work would need to begin now to meet the expected demand in 2023.
"What we wanted to do, as we see a big demand of data growing in the future with large societal changes with people increasingly working from home even post this pandemic ... we see ongoing demand for broadband services," he said.
"When you think about how long it takes to build out that fibre ... now is the time to start."
