It is probably of some surprise to Communications Minister Mitch Fifield that sentiment is suddenly turning so pointedly against the Coalition-flavoured national broadband network.
The minister did the media rounds this month to trumpet the fact the plan to connect the nation to high-speed broadband is halfway through, arriving for his interviews with the air of a man who feels he is fulfilling his remit to the letter.
There are now about 5.7 million premises in Australia able to connect to the NBN, and about 2.4 million people have signed up, Mr Fifield said the network will be 75 per cent built by mid-2018, and will be finished by 2020. By the government's own narrow definition of success it is in clover, it promised to get the network built quicker than Labor, and it is ... but it is finally being made to realise that this is not enough.
Take a look at any of the barometers of our times – Twitter comments, Facebook musings or quaint old Google News – and they will show the minister the uncomfortable reality that the natives are increasingly restless … and they don't blame Labor.
All of a sudden you cannot turn around for stories about Australians dissatisfied with their broadband lot, with News Ltd newspapers now also piling on in a way that makes you wonder if they have installed Men In Black-style memory erasing technology at its salubrious offices.
The minister will be surprised mainly because he is simply doing and saying the same thing that the Coalition has been presenting (to generally good press reception) since it took office from the last Labor government.
The minister has stuck rigidly to the line that the problem most Australians had with Labor's "gold-plated" fibre to the home plan was that it was taking too long.
Under the Coalition's cheaper fibre to the node plan, he maintains that Australians will be connected years faster and without the waste of money (cue party poppers).
Nature of complaints
The problem is that now the previously ill-informed or disinterested public are seeing the NBN in their own streets instead of in headlines that they flick past, they aren't happy with what we have collectively signed up for.
Complaints can be split largely into three camps … those that have been connected and are realising that the experience is largely similar or even worse than what they already had (when's the brave new future coming?!); those that have been connected and had it messed up by NBN, their internet service provider or both (can I have my old internet switched back on please?); and those that are still waiting for any sign that the NBN is coming to them and are feeling increasingly like they are stood in an endless queue at a food stand, where they can already see people ahead of them spitting the food in the bin.
There are many reasons why the NBN has been a troubled project for both political parties since its inception, and the main one is that it was a political football from day one, where every problem was seized upon as evidence of the folly of the idea.
From a practical perspective the issue has always been that it is simply a big undertaking. There are a range of potential excuses for any individual problems that arise and the general public are largely (justifiably) ignorant to what is happening on the other side of their buffering computer and TV screen.
This is not a simple case of the Coalition picking the wrong technology to base the rollout on (although it did), this is a case of a hugely complex and time-consuming initiative proving to be hugely complex and time-consuming.
Those that leapt all over the Labor government for the problems with the rollout of its technically superior version of a broadband network are seeing that there are also problems with the compromised version of the NBN that they demanded we adopt.
NBN CEO Bill Morrow gets called all the names under the sun by Twitter warriors, but he is no fool. He is simply prosecuting a defined strategy pretty effectively.
Internet service providers are also being rightfully raked over the coals for misleading download speed advertising, but they are also generally trying to offer the fastest packages they can afford to, under the CVC price regime that NBN has to charge in order to make ends meet.
Reality of flawed policy
We are finally seeing the reality of a flawed policy being realised, with the frustrating thing being that there has been no shortage of people pointing out that it was flawed to begin with.
One of the country's most knowledgeable internet entrepreneurs Bevan Slattery has already told the government that, in order to get the job done properly, they must stop forcing NBN to make a commercial return. That way NBN could stop charging ISPs so much and make higher speeds more affordable.
However, there is way too much political water under the bridge to make that a feasible move for either party, because whichever treasurer or finance minister puts the NBN on the books will have big deficit numbers to explain to a population that doesn't understand enough not to simply blame the government of the day.
So we are stuck with the situation we have today ... great isn't it?
Of course plenty of the people who are now complaining voted for the government to be doing exactly what it is doing, and probably tut-tutted along as shock jocks spoke about Labor's "white elephant" NBN.
NBN's current stats apparently show that only one in 10 installations go awry, but those kind of figures don't do anything to appease an underwhelmed and covetous nation, full of people that see first hand how much better things can be whenever they travel overseas.
The ironic thing is that Labor's initial NBN plan was electorally popular, so they could feasibly have sold it as a necessary infrastructure investment in the nation's future, without all the ROI nonsense to begin with … its not like the promised national surplus arrived anyway.
Malcolm Turnbull could then have simply promised to sharpen up the rollout and taken credit for doing so.
We'd still have had problems and point scoring no doubt, but at least it would be a rocky road that was heading somewhere exciting.
Instead we are where we are, spending billions to upgrade things for some people, while keeping lots of us on an even keel and watching on as we continue to fall behind others elsewhere in the world.
It's a long way from the exciting prospect the NBN once seemed to be.
