NBN Co's contract crisis

When NBN Co pushed back on the prices it was offered by construction companies in 2011, NBN Co's Kevin Brown said the organisation was building an national broadband network, "but not at any price".

The Government-funded company had "thoroughly benchmarked our project against similar engineering and civil works projects in Australia and overseas and we will not proceed on the basis of prices we are currently being offered," Brown said at the time. NBN Co was confident, he said, that it could secure better value for money by going a different route to the initial construction tenders.

The handing back of the Northern Territory rollout contract by Syntheo, announced yesterday, suggests the prices offered up in those original fourteen construction tenders were closer to the real costs of construction than NBN Co’s estimates.