Purpose and Beliefs

NBNOz is, first and foremost, NOT designed to be a politically based group.

The premise behind NBNOz is ensuring the building, to a substantial majority of premises, of a Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) fibre network, ie >90%, that is open-access wholesale and government controlled.

These are the main stated reasons behind this:

1- FTTH gives the majority of Australians access to bandwidth, beyond which most of them need right now, to ensure growth and future access to fast broadband.

2- FTTH removes the need for the majority of Australians to be on ageing copper infrastructure. The copper lines that run to the majority of Australians now, are anywhere from brand new (in New Estates) to 70 years old. The older the copper, the more likely the damage, meaning degradation in performance. Many hundreds of thousands of Australians can't GET broadband over copper now and those that can often unreliably or slow and only FTTH will change the majority of these cases, as Fibre-To-The-Node (FTTN) uses the current copper from the node/exchange.

3- FTTH ensures reliability, no matter the distance from a node/exchange. Current copper lines have a useful purpose for broadband distance of 6.5Km maximum, with descending speed and reliability, before broadband is essentially useless after this distance (in some cases less). FTTH, running fibre to the home, can have up to 15km between the node and the premises with NO loss in performance or reliability whatsoever. FTTN cannot provide these distances and in fact, provides higher speed but over LESS distance than current ADSL applications.


4- FTTH is eminently upgradable from the 100Mbps and 1Gbps available now, to 40Gbps in the near future, to unknown bandwidth in the long term. New hardware can be retrofitted at the node and premises and the fibre cable already laid will handle ANY bandwidth currently deemed useful. This is why current FTTN networks being rolled out across the globe are slowly morphing into FTTH, as FTTN must have ALL components (including the most expensive part of the copper to the premises) replaced to achieve significantly higher bandwidth. It is more economically prudent to do FTTH now and simply maintain it than upgrade FTTN in the future piecemeal.


Note: The next 2 points are debated, even within the NBN sphere, but are generally held to be a better current solution


5- Open-access wholesale means that Telstra will no longer dominate the Australian Telecommunications industry and will allow ALL RSP's (ISP's now) to provide competitive, cheap and reliable internet access and internet services to ALL Australians.


6- Our hope is for this network to remain government controlled, to ensure no repeat of the Telecom Australia->Telstra private monopoly. We believe essential services, of which broadband is now widely considered one, should be, in general, government controlled in Australia to ensure equity in price, reliability and service, regardless of geography, density or economic-status. This is necessary due to our spread population that has resulted in Regional and Rural Australians (which make up almost 40% of the population) having MUCH worse access to ALL essential services, including broadband.


There are many more reasons, both economic and physical why FTTH is the better and more prudent options now. However, politics is the one reason FTTN and other technologies are being sold to the Australian public as a "faster, cheaper and more sensible" option.


This group is not here to take political sides. We accept anyone from any political background, as long as they support FTTH to the majority. If current policies change and FTTH to the majority becomes the accepted solution by all parties, this group will have performed its' task well. We are not interested in becoming "Labor Stooges" or "Coalition haters."  The policies are what this group aims at, NOT the party. We are not concerned, ultimately, with who runs our country, only that they produce a majority FTTH NBN, being the most prudent economic policy AND the best for Australians.


However, it must be stated though, for posterity, that Labor, the Greens and some Independents are the parties that currently support THIS NBN of FTTH to 93% of Australians. The Coalition's policy, which has recently undergone change from scrapping the NBN entirely, to accepting NBNCo. contracts until they run out and then finding a "more cost-effective and faster way to give Australians access to cheap, fast broadband" is NOT considered acceptable. This is due to the fact that FTTH will NOT be the majority architecture and will result in not only less than 50% of Australians getting FTTH, but also no longer a wholesale, open-access network, likely with Telstra building much of the FTTN and maintaining much of its' current control on the industry. For this reason, this group is advocating a change in the Coalition policy by preference, or, if necessary, suggesting a vote against the Coalition in the 2013 elections if policy is maintained, simply on their NBN stance.

There is much discussion over several of the key points of FTTH, but ultimately, this group is designed to campaign for the continued existence, broadly, of the NBN as it is designed now. We believe it is, as a whole, the best solution currently for Australians to get access to fast, cheap and reliable broadband in the near future and for many, many years to come.