The new broadband network: what it means for your business
- Brad Howarth
- 23 September 2009
Photo credit: josowoa @ sxc.hu
While the first segments to be switched on in Tasmania in the next year, the NBN has left many pundits scratching their heads as to what it might be used for.
It seems however there plenty of ideas already vying for attention - all they need is a network to run on, and a business community that is skilled up and ready to use them.
Seven key developments enabled by the NBN
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New forms of collaboration within businesses: New applications and services will emerge that use collaborative workspace technology and high-fidelity video and audio-conferencing to enable businesses to work together and collaborative over great distances. This will revolutionise supply chains and give smaller companies a chance to compete well outside of their geographic region.
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New forms of customer service applications: Audio and video will become a more prominent component of web -based sales and support, with the web now becoming a primary link into customer contact centres.
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Adoption of software-as-a-service will accelerate: Companies will increasingly move away from buying computer servers and software applications in favour of renting them over the internet as they are needed. This will deliver more computing power at a lower price to SMEs. Storage and backup services are also likely to move online, as will telephony services.
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Advanced tele-working and engagement of consultants: Faster and more reliable connections will accelerate the trend towards letting staff work from home, and could see companies employing staff that never set foot in the office. New applications and services will be developed to help employers manage and communicate with remote staff more effectively, again involving collaborative workspaces and video-conferencing. Businesses will be able to retain the skills workers who choose to move away from the cities, and recruit so-called sea-changers back into the workforce.
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Virtual worlds: A disappointment to date, but higher bandwidth will combine with improved 3D modelling tools to create better simulations of both real-world and imagined environments, hosted online. These can be used for urban planning or training simulations, or as environments for virtual meetings and seminars, and may be particularly useful for education and training purposes.
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A reworking of the traditional role of internet service providers: The NBN will make it harder for ISPs to compete on price or speed (they will all be using the same network) which will see them have to compete on services. A new class of service providers will emerge who will sell access to applications, or groups of applications that may be applicable to specific tasks of industries, such as an online service that handles all of the transactional work for panel beaters.
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A new breed of services industries: The rapid uptake of high-speed broadband will require the evolution of traditional IT service providers to meet the needs of customers, both in providing technical connection services and in helping them plan how their businesses can take advantage of these services. #
