Bias or truth? nbn™’s official blog just can’t stop attacking the former Government’s Fibre to the Premises policy. Does this fall foul of the GBE guidelines?
Along with last year’s flashy redesign of the then “NBN Co” website, the company introduced a “blog” section to their revamped site. Whether you liked it or not, at that point the NBN rollout had transitioned to the Multi-Technology Mix strategy. However, it became evident quite quickly that this site is being used to trash the former Labor Government’s NBN policy while parading the current Government’s policy of the “Multi-Technology Mix” rollout.
I’ve completed an analysis of all 127 blog articles posted on the nbn™ blog, as at the morning of 24th June 2015. The results are not surprising (see the table at the bottom for my full results):
Clear evidence of bias
Not an FTTN party pooper
For example, nbn™’s blog is all too happy to spruik British Telecom’s (BT) headline up-to speed of 76Mbps download. The figure pops up numerous times in nbn™ blog posts, including here and here. But when it was revealed that 74% of households could not reach the headline 76Mbps speed at all, nbn™ was silent. One might say, it’s bad to push a negative impression of its rollout own rollout strategy to the community. But then, why would nbn™ be more than happy to trash the Fibre to the Premises technology on its blog, given it accounts for almost a quarter of the MTM rollout.
FTTP? Neverrr!
Likewise, even when there’s positive news about a particular FTTP rollout, the company blog always takes a negative spin about the topic on hand. For example, when Singapore announced nationwide 1Gbps speeds over FTTP – nbn™ immediately went on the negative focusing on the issues of the aggressive competition in Singapore. Keep in mind, these issues will never affect Australia as no incumbent telco has the money to roll out such a network across such a vast landmass… which is why the NBN existed in the first place.