THE Singaporean company named as one of Telstra's biggest worries by its outgoing chief executive David Thodey has labelled parts of the $41 billion national broadband network (NBN) as "shit" as it prepares to launch services in Australia.
MyRepublic is a Singaporean start-up led by co-founder Malcolm Rodrigues that offers unlimited broadband at super-fast speeds for low prices.
When asked about competition during his exit interviews, Mr Thodey said it was tier-three disrupters including MyRepublic that the company worried about more than TPG or Optus.
Now the disrupter is coming to Australia, having previously launched in New Zealand and Indonesia. Mr Rodrigues told Fairfax Media that MyRepublic will build a local team this year and launch services by mid-2016 with the goal of shaking up the entire broadband market.
"We've kind of re-engineered the economics of telcos and this is what David Thodey was talking about," he said. "We're going to come in with an unlimited 100 megabit per second offer at the $80-$90 per month range.
"We acquire customers at a fraction of the cost of incumbents, we [provide] service [to] those customers at a fraction of the cost and we don't churn."
By comparison, Optus charges $125 per month for broadband bundles with similar conditions while TPG customers pay $99 per month. Telstra does not offer home consumers 100Mbps speeds or unlimited downloads.
Mr Rodrigues said he "loved the NBN" but that it had lost its way by moving onto fibre-to-the-node technology, which partly relies on slower copper phone lines to cut costs and save time. His company benefits from networks that operate on one foundation technology.
The Coalition ordered the change after Labor's NBN rollout hit major construction problems and delays. But Mr Rodrigues claimed FTTN reliance on copper would see it deliver slower speeds than promised – a claim the government strongly denies.
'Completely stuffed it'
"I don't know what [the government] is doing on the other policy fronts but on this they've completely stuffed it," he said. "More and more Australians will leave the country looking for jobs and you'll continue to be a resource based economy – the hope of building IT jobs and a digital economy will kind of be more difficult to achieve.
"On FTTN we'll market 100Mbps and when people come over we'll say 'sorry, thank your government [because] you're on a shit network and the most you can get is 20-30Mbps, but we will continue to lobby your government to turn it into a fibre-to-the-home one and as soon as you get there we'll get you a free upgrade to fibre'."
Mr Rodrigues said the NBN was clearly gaining momentum and would eventually find its way. But he was also adamant that Australia would fall behind if 50Mbps by 2020 was used as the national internet benchmark.
"We want to turn Indonesia into a digital nation – I want to start stealing jobs from Australia and have people come do it out of that market," he said
However, NBN public affairs manager Tony Brown said FTTN trials were delivering "extremely positive" results.
"The speeds are very, very good so far," he said. "The experience in other markets where they're running this technology has been very strong and MyRepublic's experience has been in Singapore, which is a tiny market and New Zealand where the footprint is much smaller."
Ovum research director David Kennedy said MyRepublic was "a serious company making significant inroads in the Singaporean market" but disagreed with some of Mr Rodrigues' claims.
"NBN hasn't even completed its technical trials for FTTN and we're not sure what technology they'll use," he said. "So they could move the nodes much closer to premises than would normally be the case … and that would see much higher speeds.
"There's also nothing inconsistent with the NBN's rollout plan and taking fibre further out in the future [but] obviously their priority now is delivering on commitments made."
He also said providing more Australians with better internet coverage was far more important than delivering faster internet speeds.
"When the NBN is finished rolling out we'll actually have a ubiquitous national fixed-network and I don't think whether it's 50Mbps, 100Mbps or 1 gigabit per second really matters that much to the applications that really drive productivity," he said.
