My involvement with How Fast is the NBN, a website which compares the speed of everyday internet usage such as uploading Facebook albums and downloading Game of Thrones using either Labor's National Broadband Network or the Coalition's broadband policy, has been a wild ride.

I felt that the ALP was doing a poor job of selling the benefits of their enormously more capable and future-proof Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) National Broadband Network. Neither party, nor the media, had been able to succinctly demonstrate, to the non tech-savy audience, the difference between Labor and the Coalition's NBN policies.

The average person has never experienced speeds greater than a few tens of megabits. When connected to my university's network, my downloads will regularly hit 800-900 megabits per second and uploads 300-400Mbit to severs around Australia. Going home to my poorly syncing 4Mbit down 0.5Mbit up ADSL2+ is always depressing. I wanted people to be able to "feel" the speed and appreciate the wide performance differential between FTTP and FTTN (Fibre to the Node).