NBN v 2.0 : A new railway gauge disaster

Skimping and changing track halfway through an infrastructure build is fought with disaster. Any student of engineering history will know the debacle of railway gauges in Australia. Could the same processes be at work with the proposed changing of the NBN rollout schedule.

Despite the constant discussions about technology the NBN is happening right now, it's happening! In 60+ regions across the country there are guys and girls everywhere rolling out fibre. The work's been done on design, the contracts have been signed, the workers are out in the field.

Should a new government decide to change the current model by compromising the current network design it will inevitably create network differentials. Some areas will fly with fibre to the premise and others will be compromised with whatever cheap / lesser technology is deemed fit.

Historical experience will tell us it will be the outer metro, rural and regional areas that are not currently under construction that will get the compromised service. Which ever way you look at it this is how the "get it faster for less money" policy spiel from Turnbull et.al will pan out.

So the new reality could be; areas with and without the gigabit speeds that the decades ahead will demand. Sure it's hard to think how we could use that throughput now, but one thing is certain, bandwidth demands will increase massively each year, as they have done historically.

A similar discussion happened in the 1870's with the roll out of the railway lines in the colonies of Australia. Almost every state ran their own track gauge widths, as they all never thought the railways would become a national network. 
In Australian Economics and Trade 101, this was THE example of infrastructure short sightedness. So much so, that the history lesson is taught in economic schools around the world. It was even a sticking point to the federation of Australia itself. Dumb with a ten foot high D . Differentiated rail gauges have cost the nation billions in replacement infrastructure and lost commercial opportunities.

So here we are with a similar logic applied by the grandsons of those railway gauge accountants in the alternative government. "Save money now" (with new cheaper differentiated technology deliveries) I hear them cry.

Should this come to pass (I'm not sure Mr Turnbull is so silly), historians would need to write a new chapter in Australia's infrastructure stuff ups.