The rollout of the NBN was one of many issues contested during the election campaign, but it would appear neither side of politics was offering a system to beat the world.

Australia’s ranking when it comes to “networked readiness” slipped from 16th to 18th, according to the World Economic Forum’s global information technology report for 2016 released on Wednesday.

The nation was ranked in ninth place in 2004.

Australian Industry Group chief Innes Willox said despite the efforts from all sides of politics to improve our digital readiness, Australia clearly still has some way to go to regain a place inside the world’s top 10.

He said there is a clear gap between the top seven ranked economies and other advanced economies, with Singapore, Northern Europe and United States dominating the top spots.

However, Mr Joyce defended the Coalition’s fibre-to-the-node broadband network against Labor’s fibre-to-the-premise model.

“We’ll have the NBN as promised, in Tamworth in the first quarter of 2017,” he said.

“When Abbott came in there was no plan. If you told me to build a house and I arrived there and there was no architectural plan or no material there would be nothing to build the house with.

“It was a statement and now we have a contracted plan of the rollout and we are all lined up and ready to go.

“This is fibre-to-the-node, for the services that people are buying the satellite is already there.

“The packages people are buying are at 25Mb per second or less, if you wanted a one gigabit per second service we can provide it, but it would be $17,000 a month.

“No one wants to buy it, but if someone really needs it they can get it.

“Generally, 80 per cent of the people we provide service to want the 25Mb per second service. 

People buy the products for what they need to use them for. If you can provide exactly what they want at a vastly cheaper price they are happy with that.”