Perth Voice Interactive

THE entire electorate of Perth has been wiped off the National Broadband Network rollout map.

The Coalition government says, hand on heart and hope to die, that it has nothing to do with Perth being a Labor seat.

Suburbs that were to get connected, including Morley, have been dropped.

Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull says Perth should be grateful the NBN’s still rolling out in some areas, since the rollout was “dead in the water” when he took over.

Favours

Perth MP Alannah MacTiernan reckons the new schedule favours Liberal seats.

Dropped from the schedule are suburbs with monumentally crappy internet speed, she says.

Ms MacTiernan says copper wire is so far-gone in some suburbs that Mr Turnbull’s “NBN-lite simply won’t work. She thinks that may also be why they’ve been dropped.

Labor’s NBN would have taken optic fibre to the home. Mr Turnbull’s uses a mix of fixed wireless and fibre-to-the-node (a box in the street), with the distance between the node and the home utilising existing telephone copper.

Earlier this year the Voice found residents in Bedford—a stone’s throw from the Perth CBD—with internet so slow they could barely email, let alone have kids work on graphics-heavy school assignments.