How the Gillard and Abbott NBN’s compare globally

There has been a heap of press this week on the back of the Coalition’s NBN policy announcement in a slick launch at the Foxtel Studios yesterday.  There were a lot of sarcastic tweets, and a pretty funny Facebook page.

Using Akamai’s “The State of the Internet” report from Q3, 2012 I compared the global average peak connection speeds  with what is currently being built by the Gillard government, and what Abbott and Turnbull have proposed. Now I am no network genius and am positive that I am making pretty simplistic assumptions about peak speeds with both models, particularly the Coalition NBN which uses the poorer Fibre To The Node (FTTN) which degrades over distances (apparently).

Regardless of the politics, claims, and counter-claims, the real question is which model will give Australia a competitive advantage?

Based on my analysis, the Abbott NBN barely moves the dial in terms of average peak connection speed by 2016, and gets Australia to a ranking of 2 by 2019 (on 2012 rankings, so I would assume global peak connection speeds will have increased significantly by then) .

Both the 100Mbps and 1Gbps versions of the Gillard NBN get Australia significantly above current global connection speeds which for my $40 billion looks like pretty good value.