NBN to finish on time: Quigley

The high speed National Broadband Network (NBN) will still be completed on time despite delays in the rollout of the $35.9 billion project across Australia, a parliamentary inquiry has been told.

NBN Co chief executive, Mike Quigley, said several factors had delayed the schedule in the corporate plan for the company.

These included the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's (ACCC) decision that NBN must increase the points of interconnect to 121, from 14, and an obligation to provide fibre services to new housing estates from the start of 2011.

Quigley said a June agreement with Telstra to gain access to its pits, ducts and boxes had taken longer than expected to come to fruition, with the telco's shareholders not due to vote on the deal until next Tuesday, while the two companies waited for the ACCC to decide on their structural separation undertaking.

Another factor was a decision to initially suspend the tenders for the NBN rollout due to Quigley's conviction that taxpayers were not receiving value for money.

He said the combined effect was a delay in the schedule outlined in the corporate plan but the project would finish on time.

"We have not changed our end date (2021) for the program and that means we have to work a little bit harder towards the back end of that," Quigley told a joint committee inquiring into the NBN in Canberra on Thursday.

Quigley said he had briefly glanced at a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit stating the NBN project was the "most extreme" example of government intervention in broadband planning in the world.

The report by the research arm of UK magazine The Economist criticised Labor's plan to build a fibre cable network to 93 per cent of homes and businesses while using fixed wireless and satellite technology for the rest.

Quigley said he stopped reading the report when it made a significant error on the NBN's plan.

"According to the report I can save an enormous amount of capex (capital expenditure) as I only have to pass seven and a half million homes, not 13 million homes," he said.

"But they believe it is seven and a half (million), so I didn't get much further than that."

Many firms aspired to the long-term broadband architecture of a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network, which several to which companies were now updating to after initially building cable networks to the node or kerb.

"If you employ a fibre-to-the-node network, you are likely to waste half of that investment you've made in so deploying (it)," he said.

Committee member and Opposition communications spokesman, Malcolm Turnbull, asked Department of Broadband and Communications infrastructure deputy secretary, Daryl Quinlivan, whether the government had decided to canvass other technologies to achieve comparable broadband speeds at a lower cost than the NBN.

"The minister and the prime minister made it clear over the last two years that they fully considered all the options that were available to them before making the decision in April 2009," Quinlivan replied.

There had been no reconsideration since that decision had been made, he said.

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