The fate of Australia’s National Broadband Network, which aims to bring internet access to the country’s farthest flung outposts, will not be known until the outcome of the country’s federal election is known.

The Labor government and conservative Liberal-led opposition have vastly different plans for the A$37.4 billion for the network (NBN).

A Liberal-led coalition election victory would drastically alter the way the NBN is rolled out, says Melbourne-based RMIT University electrical engineering expert Mark Gregory.

“There will still be activity, but there will definitely be winners and losers,” Gregory says.

While Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Labor government initially promised to deliver Internet speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (Mbps) to 93% of premises by 2021 using fiber-optic cables, with the remaining remote locations served by satellite and fixed wireless, those goals have been steadily scaled back.

The project has also been plagued with problems and in-fighting among the companies tasked with building the network.

Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott, on the other hand, promises a A$30 billion fiber-to-the-node network. Under this plan, high-speed fiber would be laid to streetside “nodes” but the final connection to homes and businesses would rely on Telstra Corp Ltd’s ageing copper wires, with much slower download speeds than fiber.

The Liberal Party says this would provide 25 Mbps minimum by 2016 and 50 Mbps for the “vast majority of households” by 2019.

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