Like a lot of people this morning I had a “what the….” moment when Kevin Rudd announced the Federal Government’s decision to not award the NBN contract to a successful bidder; instead they will terminate the bidding process and invest billions in a FTTH network that over the next 8 years will reach 90% of the population.

Whatever your politics, it’s a bold, bold move.

Senator Nick Minchin was first off the opposition front bench to decry the decision as a “monumental policy failure”, while Senator Fiona Nash claims it was the National Party’s idea in the first place.  (Does this mean that it’s OK to have a dumb idea, as long as you don’t implement it?)

News sites, blogs and Twitter are all running hot today as everyone with a brain (and many without) expresses their opinions.  So here’s mine:  Good decision, Mr. Rudd. Instead of a lowest-cost FTTN network, we’re going to have a surprisingly well-funded (over A$40b) government-controlled piece of common infrastructure on which retail ISP’s will be able to compete equally on service and price.  Over fibre.  To my house!

Australia’s sheer size and sparsity of population makes physical networking a challenge, unlike, say Singapore, where fibre to the home has been largely a reality for the better part of a decade.  So it makes sense to learn from failed commercial exercises like the roll-out of cable television infrastructure that if we’re going to have internationally competitive infrastructure, we need to level the playing field.

In theory, the Australian government has just taken the first steps to this objective. Time and history will tell whether they get the execution piece right.