NBN: Sanity checking the Coalition forecasts. Can't do it.

I've worked on and off for the last 2 weeks on reverse engineering the Coalition spreadsheets on the projected financials for their hybrid FTTP/FTTN NBN.

The spreadsheets finish at 2019 whilst the commentary includes claims until 2021.
Senator Conroy, DBCDE and NBN Co haven't published anything on this, so I'll follow suit.


I cannot reconcile these statements with the spreadsheet data:

• Revenue over 2012‐2021 is $16 billion, versus $23 billion in the current NBN Co plan.
• Opex over 2012‐2021 is $22 billion, versus $26 billion in the current NBN Co plan.
• The NBN is projected to be cash flow positive in 2020‐21.

Half the total Revenue for the period has to come in those two years, requiring quite dramatic and unexplained increases in numbers of services as ARPU growth is constrained.

Operating Expenses have to halve in the last year to only be cash-flow positive in the final year, or drop by $900M a year. Again inexplicable and unexplained.

There are some serious errors or undocumented radical assumptions in the Coalition spreadsheets.
This isn't just swapping CapEx for OpEx in the Telstra payments or shortening the period to 7 years (forcing a large drop in OpEx in 2021).