The federal government is throwing another $2.4 billion at NBN Co. in order for it to continue the slow replacement of cooper wiring with fibre.
The funding will supposedly go to upgrading a further 1.5 million homes and businesses from FTTN to FTTP connection by the end of 2025 – by which time the technology will no doubt have been usurped.
This comes during the same week NBN Co announced the next 300,000 premises to receive the upgrades.
This seems like throwing good money after bad.
In 2020, NBN Co. paid out close to $78 million to 3,800 staffers, including eight executives who took home average bonuses of $440,988 – which the Labor government pointed out at the time, was the equivalent of 88 Cartier watches each.
Stephen Rue (pictured above), the country’s highest-paid government employee, paid himself a handsome $3 million salary that year, on top of a $1.2 million bonus for steering the bungled rollout.
“Around one in five premises are connected to plans based on NBN wholesale speed tiers offering peak wholesale download speeds of 100 Mbps and above,” Rue said of the latest cash influx.
“With more connected devices and more simultaneous data usage in homes and businesses, we expect to see growing demand for faster broadband services.
“Fibre is inherently more capable of delivering faster upload and download speeds, is generally more reliable than copper connections and reduces our maintenance and operating costs.”
