A global study on government-sponsored broadband projects aired reservations on the wisdom of spending huge amounts of taxpayers' money to finance the realisation of a national broadband network such as the case of Australia.

The report argued that declared benefits of such projects could be exaggerated and strongly suggested that governments across the globe should consider hard before plunking down the cash for a mammoth undertaking such as the $37.5 billion worth NBN roll out in Australia.

Authored by siblings Robert and Charles Kenny, the paper titled 'Superfast: Is it Really Worth the Subsidy?' questioned the economic data pushed forward by the Labor-led Australian government when it unveiled the NBN project in 2009, which is nearing full implementation by next year with the anticipated approval of the Australian Parliament on Monday.

The US-based writers told ABC that it was hard to believe that a very fast national broadband network would be able to spawn economic growth, claiming that the benefits being pictured to be delivered by the expensive telecommunications infrastructure were mostly standing on weak foundations.

To support their arguments, the writers cited that considerable economic achievements have been attained largely on the back of the existing broadband infrastructures, with the likes of Amazon and eBay sufficiently proving that basic broadband alone could generate the needed economic expansion.

With such realisation, the introduction of a much-better broadband system appears to be of a lesser necessity as both writers stressed that gravitating towards the fibre optics network would prove to be a hard-sell "because faster speeds just don't make that much difference."

The report, however, conceded that spending billions on the NBN could still be justified so long as the government Prime Minister Julia Gillard could explicitly identify the clear benefits of such a huge public expenditure.

In responding to the report critical to a project he is fronting, Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said in a statement that at the very least, the working paper had supported the fact that the wireless broadband technology could never duplicate the efficiency of fixed-wired connections, thus the need for the full roll out of the NBN.

However, his opposition counterpart, Malcolm Turnbull called the paper as a timely reminder on whether a superfast broadband network could actually deliver sufficient productivity gains for Australia and "to what extent governments should be making very big subsidies to support the roll out of fibre to the home."

The broadband report was made public as the Australian parliament is set to finalise on Monday the structural partitioning of Telstra Corporations, the country's dominant telco firm, which should set the stage for the full roll out and operation of NBN.