Surely, no-one could really be so breathtakingly stupid as to take the cost of a project in startup phase, and use that cost extrapolate the cost across the whole thing?
No, GG. I don't think either you or the Mad Monk are that silly. But it's no better to create disingenuous arguments based on such a ridiculous premise.
What if you did the same thing to a gold mine? How much would it have cost from inception through to extracting the first ounce of gold? Would you then declare the mine unviable, because that first ounce cost thousands of times its value to get out of the ground?
The NBN is no different. Before a
single customer can be connected, they must employ a management team, network designers, construction crews. They must purchase infrastructure, equipment, real estate, radio spectrum and sign numerous contracts. They must build a transit network to connect the NBN to the internet, contract or build data centres, create billing and operational support software systems... The list goes on and on. In all likelihood, they probably spent half a billion before just one customer was active, never mind 4,000.
As for the numbers, allow me to present this table from the 2010 NBN Corporate plan, to show just how ridiculous Abbott's claim is:
http://nbnmyths.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/nbnforecast-connections.png
As you can see, the claim about 35,000 connections is BS. Every single one of those connections was supposed to be a Greenfield Build-Operate-Transfer connection. ie, it means it was to be built by the private sector (eg Opticomm), operated by them until the transit network is built, and then eventually transferred to the NBN sometime in the future.
These connections still took place, but not under a BOT agreement because NBN Co cancelled the Greenfield panel, presumably because the greenfield builders tried to charge them more that they were willing to pay. Instead, NBN Co signed Fujitsu in May 2011 to build greenfields for NBN Co directly, instead of under a BOT arrangement.
NBN Co itself wasn't supposed to have a single active customer as at 30/6/11, although they had about 800 at that stage.