The Coalition’s telecommunications policy – quietly delivered as a press release two days before the election – was probably a non-issue in its election drubbing, but its revival of a 2013 corker by former PM Tony Abbott shows how far the party’s tech policy hasn’t evolved.
An elected Coalition government would, Shadow Minister for Communications and Nationals leader David Littleproud said in the press release, have spent its first year developing a framework to “reform and modernise universal service obligations” for telcos.
This would include broadening the basic service requirements for mobile tower infrastructure and “better defining minimum output requirements of mobile towers”, although the policy does not identify what current deficiencies it would have tried to fix.
The policy also includes setting minimum broadband and voice service speeds of at least 25Mbps for customers with fixed line and wireless broadband services, and would have set “minimum repair timeframes” for all infrastructure to speed repair of mobile outages.
“Mobile coverage and reliability simply isn’t good enough in regional Australia,” Littleproud said in calling for a “common sense approach to fix it and provide country communities with the services they deserve.”
“New emerging technology like [Low Earth Orbit] satellites will play an increasingly important role, but as a first principal we need to get the technology we rely on right now up to expectations.”
Gonna (Liberal) Party like it’s 2013
The Opposition’s choice of target speeds is significant as an indicator of the parties’ thoughts on what constitute adequate broadband speeds in 2025 – when average fixed broadband download speeds are already sitting at 81.61Mbps and mobile speeds average 113.70Mbps.
The ACCC’s broadband performance data doesn’t even track the performance of now obsolete 12Mbps plans, with 25Mbps representing the minimum NBN speed and customers on that plan averaging 26Mbps in reality; fixed wireless customers average over 81Mbps.
Average downloads on the NBN are set to double by 2029, NBN Co recently revealed, with uploads to quadruple by 2032 as the average broadband household grows to have 44 connected devices – up from 25 today – by the end of the decade.
This projected demand has underscored NBN programs such as its fibre upgrade, which the company says is on track to eliminate the last 622,000 fibre to the node (FTTN) services – the longtime darling of Coalition telecommunications policy – by December this year.
The 25Mbps figure in the new policy, therefore, is not an aspirational figure but a throwback to 2013, when former Coalition leader Tony Abbott – who long decried the NBN as “essentially a video entertainment system” – pushed back on Labor’s promise of fast speeds.
The average household, Abbott infamously said, would find 25Mbps services “more than enough”, a statement that was widely slammed as short-sighted and filed alongside Bill Gates’s apocryphal claim that 640KB of memory would be enough for anybody.
Plugging the regional gaps
For the Coalition to be still talking up 25Mbps, 16 years after Labor proposed the all-fibre NBN that is soon to be completed, suggests either a dogged insistence that Abbott’s early NBN opposition was well-founded – or that the Liberals and Nationals are out of ideas.
The Coalition’s broad outline of its regional policy measures also references the establishment of a $20 billion Regional Australia Future Fund, whose stated goals include “improving regional mobile and internet services for [regional and rural] communities.”
“The Albanese Government has shown no interest in improving telecommunications, demonstrated by their sparse funding commitments,” McIntosh said, arguing that the “botched closure of the 3G network has left people stranded without telephone services.”
Speeds aside, the Coalition’s proposed policy retreads ground that has already been covered by Labor policy – with the government driving NBN speed upgrades and moving to modernise the Universal Service Obligation (USO) with an eye to improving regional services.
Broad adoption of LEO satellite services has been earmarked as a way of filling the last regional and rural coverage gaps, and with benchmarks showing that Starlink speeds max out at 111Mbps, there is more hope than ever for long-suffering regional Australians.
Labor’s completion of the NBN’s FTTP transition was the main telecommunications-related policy feted before the election, and was matched by the Coalition as both parties laid out plans to crack down on exploitation of content and users on social media.
