The SR doesn't describe the overall financial difference as insignificant but if you wish to discount those parts of the report that are not favourable to your point of view, the conclusion you've reached is not going to be surprising.
I'm not wedded to any specific technological outcome, but what I do know is that with 6-years in office, Labor had its chance and botched it.
The first big test for the coalition as a government will be the practicality (and hence deliverability) of the technological mix outlined the first NBN Co corporate plan under their tenure next year. It's then a question of how well they deliver.
Interesting that The Liberals have removed Tony's speech from their NBN policy released in April at the Liberal party web site.
Tony was "very proud" of all the research behind their 80 pages of "policy" and claimed
"It is very high quality work indeed. It’s work of a quality to surpass just about anything that an Opposition has previously done." * months later and it turns out they were very wrong.
Yet the LN+P continue to claim they can gain full access to the copper and HFC networks for FREE. They also ignore the issues of copper remediation. Not once have they put a $ figure to how much it will cost to replace bad copper. How can you claim to be able to do a network rollout cheaper by reusing current infrastructure, yet not bother to do even a small audit of the infrastructure to get some real world statistics on how suitable that infrastructure is? It could quite easily lead to a massive costs blowout if the "bagdad" network is as bad as some of the pictures from Telstra line techs make it look like.
Not once has a $ figure been calculated for OPEX of the FTTN and compared to FTTP over a 10 year period - the longer the time frame the worse it looks for FTTN OPEX, especially as further copper remediation is required. No acknowledgment of how difficult it will be to get 60,000+ nodes connected to the electricity network. No acknowledgement of community anger over the placement of the nodes. Just look at people's anger over the HFC cables when they were being rolled out, and I'd say they are less of an eye sore than a node.
The LN+P have done a major policy backflip mainly based on issues that were highlighted to them since their policy launch in April. What's worrying is that they are still to face up to a host of major issues for the FTTN rollout.
As yet no mention of who will pay the billions to upgrade the HFC network to cope with around 3 times the current number of customers. Optus pretty much doesn't sign up new customers, and Telstra seems to refuse new connections in areas suffering from high congestion, of which there's quite a few. Just checkout whirlpool postings about cable internet speeds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amG62Yar1fI sums up the issues of cable internet in a humorous way. To resolve the current congestion issues, and ensure a reasonable service in the future a lot of new nodes will have to be installed. It nearly feels like the LN+P are hoping people will assume the HFC served areas can get high speed internet for no extra CAPEX.