Kevin Rudd has likened it to the building of the Snowy Hydro and the Sydney Harbour Bridge as ‘an historic act of nation-building’. Announced on 7 April, Australia’s new $43 billion plan for broadband will deliver 100 Mbits/sec download speeds to 90% of Australian households within eight years via optical fibre lines running all the way to their homes, schools and workplaces.

The network will be built and operated by a new company in which the Commonwealth will be the majority shareholder. Rudd’s new plan replaces the one Labor took to the 2007 election, promising to spend $4.7 billion on a network delivering 12 Mbits/sec to 98% of the population, which replaced the Coalition’s $1 billion plan for improved broadband in non-metropolitan areas. This talk considers the origins of the new plan and asks who will benefit and who will pay for it.

This talk was presented on 30 April 2009.