Think Tank: get on the broadband wagon

• 19 November 2008
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

The panel

• Lisa Harvey, owner/director of Energetica, an IT services firm for non-profit organisations
• Ian Lyons, communications director of online marketing firm pureprofile
• Cameron Wall, ICT director of mobile phone applications developer G-nius Mobile Intelligence
• Louis White, moderator

Why is broadband so bad?

Australia is one of the few countries in the world that has broadband caps and one of the most expensive as well. Has the government not got its head around it? Has Telstra deliberately delayed it?

Cameron Wall: Geographic factors are obviously a big issue. Japan is maybe half the size of New South Wales with a much larger population. Plus Australia has limited competition. On the other hand, Australia is probably one of the most advanced countries in the world in broadband on mobiles. That’s because there’s more competition.

Lisa Harvey: The population density means the infrastructure costs are higher per person to deliver, particularly in regional areas, but that should be no excuse. There are technologies that should be able to overcome that such as wireless and mobile, but even those are still not well delivered.

Ian Lyons: I don’t think our politicians believe broadband matters. I don’t think they understand intrinsically that it is a major enabler for us to be the smart country. You see the new shadow minister for broadband misspeaking and the minister Stephen Conroy issuing a press release jumping on the fact that he said digital instead of analogue. They’re politically point scoring. They haven’t convinced me that they understand how important this stuff is or have the willpower to do anything about it.

Should government get involved?

Maybe the government doesn’t get it, but who should actually be in control of connectivity: government or market forces?

Ian: There’s broadband in in this building, but I can’t connect to it because the wireless network is locked. Until we start thinking about broadband as a utility, like electricity or water, we’re not going to change much.

I would be happy for my tax dollars to fund a core connectivity infrastructure that enables the private market to create additional services on top of it. I’d rather my taxes were spent on that than a lot of other things.

Lisa: One way of making it easier would be to free up the regulations and allow small organisations to create community networks or small business networks, for example in a regional centre or a suburban hub. You could widen access to broadband and expand it out to a lot more people. Currently the barriers to entry to that market are huge. You have to get a carrier licence but small businesses can’t afford the expense and the complications.

Cameron: If a lot of small businesses lobbied the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) and said, we’ll handle the hand-off to the fibre at the phone exchange and then use wireless to go out from there to 120 local businesses or whatever, anyone can do that. It could be the local chamber of commerce in a small town. Whether ACMA will let them do it is another thing. And Telstra will lobby against them ever doing it.

Ian: One big thing is the 24-month lock-in periods from ISPs. Even if it’s bad service, you are still locked in. ISPs need to change their attitude. What if they said, ‘We still want to lock people in through great customer service’? No one moves away from great service. The number of people using wireless broadband has doubled in the last year or so. The analysts say it’s because they don’t lock you in.

Cameron: If you have to get a 24-month plan, make sure you can change your plan from within that carrier, upgrade or downgrade your speed or download cap. I know they’re just doing it to reduce churn. If something like 20% of small businesses go bust within the first two years, telcos are going to end up with a lot of bad debts.

Ian: Also, it’s way too technical. Who cares about WPA password strings? Everyone just sticks them on post-it notes underneath their desks anyway, so much for security. Apple has taken great steps but the industry needs to take much bigger steps and make it very, very simple to connect.

Applications for small business

What do small businesses use broadband for and what could they be doing with it?

Cameron:  If they’re a retailer, they probably have an EFTPOS machine and one or two computers in the back office. Even a low-bandwidth connection is fine. An estate agency might have eight people on a network. Even then, ADSL2 is more than enough for most data applications.

Lisa: At a lot of small business networking events, I ask people what are you using the internet for and they say, ‘Email and we’ve got a website, I think’. So maybe there isn’t demand for broadband, or is the supply insufficient so people learn to make do without it?

Cameron: I think that’s a big grey area.

Lisa: We design websites that are often accessed by people in regional areas with very low bandwidth and we have to take that into account. I would love to increase the capability of those technologies because surely that should drive the demand for better broadband. But you can’t supply it without them being able to access it.

Cameron: I have done some work with the Livestock Association. A lot of farmers, all they do with their dial-up is at the end of the day, they upload a file and they might check their email. They’re not watching YouTube.

Lisa: The New South Wales Government last year said it intended to do a city-wide, free wireless network. That was a grand idea but they canned it. Maybe they were pressured from people who wanted to make more profit out of it.

Cameron: I’m sure they were.

Lisa: But a low-bandwidth access network has got to drive demand. Once people start using applications online and see the benefits, they will then start demanding better.

Ian: I’d love to see ubiquitous free access at a low bit rate, for example, and if you want faster services, you pay on top of that. When I’m in a conference and people in the room can’t communicate because the hotel’s wireless network is down or there’s no 3G access in the Blue Mountains, it absolutely retards communication and progress.

Telstra’s outgoing communications director, Phil Burgess, compared it a bottleneck at a port facility for coal export, which has the same effect as having a $5 billion company put out of business every year. The impact on our economy is so massive, we have no idea how much we’re missing out on in terms of doing clever things.