The man at the helm of one of Australia's largest ever infrastructure projects has defended the wholesale, controversial changes his government has made to the NBN as it crosses the halfway point to completion.
Communications Minister Mitch Fifield on Monday said the Turnbull government was taking a "technology agnostic approach" to the rollout of the National Broadband Network when questioned over the project's effectiveness and speed.
"We have taken an approach that will see the NBN rolled out much faster and at significantly less cost," Mr Fifield told reporters in Sydney.
The NBN project began under the Rudd Labor government in 2007 and aimed to reach 98 per cent of Australian premises by June 2021.
A decade later, the Liberal government is celebrating the halfway point of the project, with the network now available to more than 5.7 million homes and businesses.
But reports of dropouts, long connection times and complaints about speed have dogged the project and its rollout.
"We do acknowledge that we do have problems from time to time," NBN Chief Engineering Officer Peter Ryan said on Monday.
"This is a very large complex program that we're rolling out here and we will have problems from time to time - we seek everyone's patience as we do that".
The coalition government promised to get the job done cheaper and faster by stripping back Labor's project to a new version in which the NBN is delivered to suburban nodes which serve multiple properties instead of running directly to individual premises.
Mr Fifield says the original 'fibre-to-the-premises' plan would have cost the government an extra $30 billion.
"Unlike our predecessors, we're not taking a theological approach to the NBN, we're taking a technology agnostic approach and giving NBN the freedom that it needs to deliver the best possible network," he said.
"This is a major project, there will obviously be a percentage of experiences in the rollout which aren't perfect but NBN is working day by day to improve that experience."
The government now expects the NBN to be available to every home and business across Australia by 2020.
Share
