MTM: the Road to Nowhere. Waste on a truly grand scale.

The widely reported Feb-2016 Australian Infrastructure Plan, resulted in a piece on The Register ("Calls for sale - in pieces - to promote competition, plus reveal of bush services' costs").

This is a repost of my comment, and a couple of follow-ups (here and here) in response to a comment claiming a 'Fail', copied below.

Two good friends contributed off-line feedback:

• Just like buying a power tool. A good one last a lifetime and a poor one lasts for a couple of sessions with it.
• I'd phrase as: Professionals find it cheaper to buy & maintain expensive tools that JFW’s (Just Works), not a throw-away for every job.

• Sometimes I wonder if anyone actually gets the basics of network design and deployment. So many people think in the ultra-short term rather than in the medium to long term. Every dollar spent now saves potentially hundreds in the future when it comes to network design and deployment.
• It's the difference between buying a cheap TP-Link router and a Cisco router for business. One might last a year, the other will last a decade.

Things I don't understand about NBN Economics: how does $1,500/premises become $4,500?

I can’t figure out the basic cost equation of the NBN.

If it’s costing ~$1,500/premise to install new fibre, how does the full cost become $4,500?
What does the extra $3,000 buy us?

The POI’s (Points of Interconnect) and transit network, the network operations centre, the provisioning & billing systems and what else? But these are common costs across all networks, it cannot be them.

FTTP costs: 2017 nbn co Corporate Plan (pg 53) Browfields: $4,411 Greenfields: $2,608. [Aug-2016]
Why does it cost $1,803/premise more for 'Brownfields' connections? It's 50% more than the pre-2013 costs. Where did these new costs come from?

There is a difference between ‘passing’ and connecting premises, so what proportion of the $1,500 is 'passing' and 'connecting'? That's hard to find and doesn't account for a three-fold increase.

Edit: Population Sources added at end, 27-Aug-2016.
Edit: Fibre cost-estimate Sources added at end, 20-Feb-2016.

Fast Start to 2013 Broadband posts

Primer: A fast start to Stevej-on-bband, pre-election 2013 posts

• Taking on Three NBN Memes of the Mainstream Media
• Why you want Fibre to your premises
• A longer version of “Why Fibre?”:  Problems with the Coalition Plan
• A pitch for “Fibre to the Farm”
• NBN Financials: Hidden costs of a VDSL Fibre to the Node network
• Copper vs Fibre - The Rivers of Gold Scenario: What if NBN Co does better than forecast?
• Sanity Checks of Turnbull 2013 Plan: too many questions, never addressed by business journalists
• Unpicking Coalition Claims: failing the Sanity Checks
  

  Is the real Coalition NBN plan going to need CapEx of $20.5 billion or $35.6 billion, a 75% increase on their first estimate??

Index to Pre-Election NBN Posts

These are links, in reverse date-order, to posts published prior to the 2013 election.

A simple coloured tagging of the content has been added.

Dispelling Turnbull's lies: under $50M/year for the extra cost to the taxpayer for the Full Fibre NBN vs mangled mess FTTN/HFC/tin-cans

Turnbull's Big Lie in the 2013 election campaign, and underlying the subsequent Reviews, is simple, profound and very, very deliberate:

What will it "cost" (implied, 'the taxpayer') to build the NBN?[that's the Network rollout, not the company]

Turnbull always knew that the one and only difference in cost to the taxpayer between his mangled copper mess and the Quigley Full Fibre plan was the yearly interest on the difference in Equity 'injected' by the Government into NBN Co. It's why he's worked so hard to discredit the 2012 FTTP business plan, to disguise the real difference between the Plans.

Budget Impact of NBN: it's only Equity investment, no Fiscal Budget Impact. [2015-16]

Sources, quotes and links for Equity Funding of NBN Co.

NOTE:

• income from Future Fund (earnings) noted in fwd estimates
• nothing for NBN. [but millions of subs]

The AASB rules differentiate clearly between investments and expenses as only investments provide a return. Investments appear as Capital or Assets on the Balance Sheet, while expenses appear as Expenditures in the Profit and Loss Statement. Depreciation of Investments, their reduction in value, is an expense.

Turnbull's Swearing Staffer, Ellis, charged with indecent act and drug possession.

Post on Pre-election Blog. Turnbull senior adviser, Ellis, has quit. I'm still to get an apology.

There are two issues for me with Turnbull's Ministerial Office and his actions:

• Anyone in a Ministerial Office, let alone "a senior advisor", doing drugs and behaving badly enough in public to get charged is not a fit and proper person to be on the public payroll or involved in making public policy. This is not "a private matter", this goes directly to the suitability for office and the poor character of the person.

• Turnbull never offered an apology, never contacted me in any way (nor any of his staff, nor Ellis or Lynch) and issues a rather misleading twitter that "calm restored". Only in his mind and  his staffers.

Turnbull still misleading, obfuscating and spinning over NBN.

Turnbull is again talking rabid nonsense while the mainstream media fail to call him out on it. Turnbull is executing his brief to "Destroy the NBN" and his spin, deception and smoke-screens are still allowed to stand.

What's completely missing in anything Turnbull has ever said on NBN Co is profitability and revenues.

Ledgers have two sides: expenses and revenues. Pretending they don't, that expenses only matter, is the chief deception and mislead that Turnbull has perpetrated.

Follow-up: Why we should've had Full Fibre NBN by now if the LNP hadn't actively quashed it

Yesterday's updated post (on 2013) with the actual text from Telstra ASX reports in April 2012 mentioned a 1995 Strategy Paper to replace the PSTN by 2010. It amazed me is that it was retweeted.

Perhaps the ALP can acquire and publish a copy of Frank Blount’s Strategy Paper, if it doesn’t already have one from the Keating era.

It’d make interesting reading and, if tabled, poses a rather embarrassing question for the Party of Small Business:

This deliberate and perverse ignoring of sound commercial advice, not once but twice, happened on their watch, costing the T2 investors (they'd suckered?) two-thirds of their money.

It’s not like Howard/Costello were strapped for Cash, they had $300+ billion in unanticipated revenue from the Chinese Mining Boom sloshing around looking for a way to be spent.

Telstra CEO's 1995 Strategy Paper: "No (copper) PSTN by 2010"

Sources for my quote on Telstra planning to have replaced it's Copper Customer Access Network by 2010. Quoted in http://www.abc.net.au/technology/articles/2013/09/19/3851924.htm.