The television ads have stopped, the last poll results are being pored over, and tomorrow more than 13 million Australians will go to the polls to decide who our federal government will be for the next three years.

Both the Coalition and the Labor Party have extensive broadband policies, and the debate over high-speed internet access has featured prominently over the six weeks of the election campaign.

Labor leader Kevin Rudd has been spruiking his $4.7 billion Fibre To The Node (FTTN) proposal endlessly. The plan, which includes minimum speeds of 12Mbps to 98% of the population by the end of 2013, will be built by the government and remain in public hands providing what Labor calls a "genuinely open access ... network".

The ALP is also promising to legislate to protect its investment in the network, ensuring more equitable access charges and allowing for the full customisation of the service — everything from speed, connection quality and contention ratios.

The bush hasn't been forgotten either. The remaining 2% of the population that will not be reached by the Labor FTTN plan will receive the benefit of the existing government contract with OPEL. The contract, signed back in June, will provide WiMax and ADSL2+ access to regional Australians at a cost of almost $1 billion.

The Liberal Party, meanwhile, is taking a different approach to broadband, but ultimately is aiming for the same lofty 12Mbit peak. Its policy, "Australia Connect", John Howard has pledged not to raid the Future Fund like Labor, but rather to seek out private sector investment to build commercially viable fibre networks in major population centres. The plan will cover 99% of Australia's population with either FTTN or ADSL2+ or WiMax via the OPEL contract.

The other 1% of the population with receive government subsidies of up to $2,750 to purchase the necessary equipment to ensure high speed internet access in the bush.

The Labor plan has received its share of criticism, though. Kevin Morgan, a former Labor staffer turned telecommunications consultant, has questioned the accuracy of the costing of the ALP's policy as well as its likely effectiveness in being able to stand up to Telstra.

In fact, the proposal will need $4 billion of Telstra shareholder's money in order to complete the plan, which will be built on existing Telstra infrastructure. Obviously, this won't be popular with Telstra's board and shareholders.

"The ALP can only stare down Telstra and succeed, where the Coalition failed, if Labor is prepared to escalate the regulatory war by threatening structural separation, effectively breaking Telstra into a wholesale network and retail companies," Morgan wrote in yesterday's Melbourne Age.

Without Telstra's blessing, the Labor policy could cost as much as $20 billion, Morgan believes.

Labor has also pledged to create a 'cleaner' internet, requiring ISPs to censor sites identified by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to households, schools and public libraries where children might access the internet. The filter, Labor says, "will prevent Australian children from accessing ... such as those containing child pornography and X-rated material."

The plan to force ISPs to filter some of their content can be traced back to 2006 when then Labor leader Kim Beazley back flipped on previous Labor policy which had described mandatory filtering as "unworkable".

The Coalition earlier this year launched its own internet filter. The software, placed on PCs in children's homes, was infamously cracked just 30 minutes after it was released by the government. But ISP level filters may not be much better, with the Western Australian Internet Association saying last election that they were "expensive and ultimately, the user can get around them".

But it's not just the major parties that you need to be focussing on tomorrow. With today's Galaxy poll in the Herald Sun predicting the possibility of a hung parliament, the broadband and communications policies of the minor parties — namely the Greens, Family First and the Australian Democrats — may also come into play.

While none of the minor parties have full broadband policies like the Coalition and Labor, they do have ideas, positions and action plans.

Family First is particularly concerned with Australia's OECD ranking in terms of broadband speed -- the second lowest among developed nations. The party also believes that there should be fair wholesale and retail access to broadband infrastructure and that "that no one supplier of broadband should exercise market power to overcharge its competitors."

Before the last federal election, Family First was slammed by industry groups, including the Western Australian Internet Association (WAIA), for wanting to place a universal filter on Australian internet connections to block child pornography and other unsavoury material.

The Australian Democrats agree that more needs to be done to ensure Telstra's fariness and commitment to competition, and believe that a national FTTN network is the best option for long-term high speed broadband access. If need be, the Democrats see that a full public funding of the network may be necessary in order to ensure the fairness they are looking for.

Similarly, the Greens, while light on specifics of their broadband policy, are very clear that any broadband network should be fully publicly owned, rather than built by a private consortium.

Links:

• No pr0n under Labor  (Whirlpool, 21 Mar 2006)
• Industry slams censorship call  (Whirlpool, 5 Oct 2004)
• Alston runs fridge magnet porn campaign  (Whirlpool, 4 Mar 2003)