Where's our broadband, Minister?
- MARGUERITE MCKINNON
- 15 April 2008
Photo credit: VANESSA LYONS
Interview with Senator Stephen Conroy Minister for Communications
The irony is beautiful. After an age of being on hold to speak with Senator Stephen Conroy, he finally answers his mobile, car indicator ticking in the background. He’s somewhere in the country, experiencing first-hand the telecommunications frustrations of regional Australians…
Nett: Senator Conroy, at last!
SC: Yeah, sorry about that.
Nett: You’ve pulled over to the side of the road?
SC: Mobile phone coverage… been a problem.
Nett: Don’t tell me you’ve got Next G?
SC: No (laughs).
We’re supposed to be talking about how great Australia’s whiz-bang new broadband network is going to be, but the stupid phone keeps dropping out during our long awaited conversation. Welcome to Australia!
Everyone who carries a mobile phone knows the feeling of an extended period being out of range. Sometimes it’s bliss being incommunicado, but usually it’s a nightmare. If the Federal Government can be believed, we’re on the cusp of getting the upgrade we desperately need, and have been waiting for, for more than a decade. Technical issues notwithstanding, I cut to the chase. Fortunately, Senator Conroy is happy to talk straight.
Nett: How does it feel to be in charge of one of the world’s slowest and most expensive internet infrastructures?
SC: Well, it has been very embarrassing. When Australians travel overseas they experience the benefits of true broadband. When visitors come here, they can’t believe our poor speeds and exorbitant pricing.
Labor promised, a little over 18 months ago, to install a national high-speed broadband network, 40 times faster, to 98 per cent of Australian homes and businesses, within five years. The Senator uses an historical anaolgy, likening the importance of building a decent national broadband network in the 21st century to that of constructing railways in the 19th.
You don’t even need to be addicted to the internet to want the promise to become a reality. Plenty of us have been so frustrated with clunky and slow internet access that we’ve devised new and deafening swear words to cope with the problem – especially when it occurs during a heavy session of online banking. No matter how fashionably slim our computers have become, our broadband fiasco ensures they will remain slow and ungainly.
While metropolitan dwellers may curse that lost bill-paying session, for country folk, the indignity of not even having broadband is trumped only by the soul‑destroying refusal of the drought to break. You can bet they will be first in line to suckle at the teat of Labor’s new bandwidth – albeit sometime in the next five years.
And not before time. The latest statistics from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that Australia has the third most expensive broadband in the world for small and medium-sized enterprises. Only the Czech Republic and Poland endure a steeper price-tag.
SC: It’s a national embarrassment, and those engaged in running small businesses have been getting it in the neck. There’s no other way to describe it.
Open access will lower prices
Driving costs down is just as important as speeding things up.
Labor maintains that the solution lies in Open Access, which will allow competition to drive down prices, and small businesses to branch out into better digital communications without taking out a second mortgage.
SC: We want to see reduced telephone bills for small business. We also want to enhance teleconferencing and video conferencing on virtual private networks. These are the sorts of services which will be absolutely critical to the future survival of small business. We have to put a network and system I place that pushes princes down. We can’t continue with the sort of ridiculous prices we’re paying at the moment. Having the third highest costs in the OECD is just ridiculous.
Nett: how will it work? Who gets the 40-times-faster broadband first?
SC:Well, it’s not one big national loop where you complete the loop in five years time and flick the switch.
The final network will take five years to construct, but the plan is to switch it on street by street, suburb by suburb, and town by town as it rolls out around Australia. Parties interested in wanting to build the national network are divided; some say they should start in country areas and work their way into the cities, others say the network has to be build inwards-out, meaning it should start in capital cities and build outwards.
SC: What we’d like to try and do is provide for the Australians who have been getting the worst access as quickly as possible.
A show of hands now please people.
What price 12mbps?
Another hurdle for the government is cost. Labor announced it would spend $4.7 billion on the rollout 18 months ago. Back then, the costing for a minimum 12 meg speed was estimated at around $8 billion, but since then new technology has emerged blowing the original estimate out of the water. This leaves the government with the option taking on a private partner, or a softer bang for our buck.
SC: Yes, the final cost is likely to be above the $8billion mark, but we’ve said we won’t contribute any more than $4.7 billion. We believe that’s a sufficient government contribution to build the national network.
The backlash against backhaul
Nett: For years, small businesses have complained about the cost of backhaul – taking product offshore – and the cost of international connections is astronomical for small business. Labor’s solution is to hold an inquiry into why Australia pays so much for its bandwidth. Is there a bottleneck? Do we need more fibre-optic cable under the oceans? Or have we just been paying through the nose just so the Telcos can maintain a monopoly?
SC: Look, there’s no question that the costs are still ridiculously high. That’s because we haven’t had a proper competitive network. We’ve had a lot of argument in the sector, we’ve got a very litigious sector and the ACCC access regime has perhaps not been strong enough. We’re trying to crack through all of that with the National Broadband Network, which will open up the super-fast speed, and the super-fast services that can be provided with those speeds and drive pricing down at the same time. We know that it’s a very ambitious project, but we’re committed to it. That’s why we allocated up to $4.7 billion in the last election. This step is critical to both Australia’s economic prosperity and to improving productivity for small business. We’ll be working with small business groups to promote broadband and show how it can work for them, but by-and-large, most small business owners, and work-from-home businesses, absolutely get it. They know what they are missing out on and they’re angry – as they should be.
Nett: Yes, Minister. #
Who’s who on the National Broadband Network Taskforce Expert Panel?
On 11 March 2008, Senator Conroy announced the formation of an expert panel to assess proposals to build the new network. The group contains six members, representing private industry, regulators and academia, and is chaired by DBCDE Secretary Patricia Scott. Its members are:
• Dr Ken Henry AC, Treasury Secretary.
• John Wylie, CEO, Lazard Carnegie Wylie.
• Tony Mitchell, Chairman, Allphones.
• Rod Tucker, Laureate Professor, University of Melbourne.
• Reg Coutts, Professor Emeritus of Communications, University of Adelaide.
• Tony Shaw, former Chairman, Australian Communications Authority.
