The ambitious Australian project of providing high speed broadband to the nation by replacing the copper cables with the fiber optic cables is on schedule said deputy PM and Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese.

The project seemed to be in trouble when Syntheo Inc the contractor for the project walked away from the project. The Deputy PM however downplayed this episode in an interview to Fairfax radio. He believed that this was not a setback and normal business practice and highlighted the fact that more than 200,000 homes and business have been passed as per the July 30 target. The Syntheo walkout on the other hand has been attributed to the very low rates the company was getting from the government and is expected to post a loss of about 30 Million Australian Dollars in its fixed communications division.

Although the project can be arguable the largest in Australia, the Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull believes that this has been a "catastrophically mismanaged project." The government, in his view, expects the contractors to get the project done at cost "that do not enable them to make a margin."

Irrespective of the politics, both sides are passionate about giving better connectivity to citizens of Australia. The project is already showing marked results if the official NBN Web site is to be believed. The Web site claims that in the year 2006, the average monthly download per household was 5GB and by December 2012 the average download per month had gone up to 31GB. Tthis was over a span of over 6 years when NBN was not yet in the picture and after the implementation of NBN in just about one year the average household download has gone up to about 46.6GB.

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