That old broadband magic

• Brad Howarth
• 4 August 2009
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

The proposed national broadband network (NBN) promises to deliver broadband internet access to 90% of the Australian population at speeds we can only dream about today.

To date, however, all it has delivered is questions, such as when will it be built?, what will it cost? and where will it reach?

But perhaps the most important question for business is: what can they do with all that bandwidth?

In most counties the deployment of high-speed broadband has happened in tandem with the delivery of new entertainment services, such as internet-based television (also called IPTV). In Australia, however, it is happening as a government initiative rather than to meet a defined business need.

The question of what the NBN will be used for is often answered with the belief that businesses will quickly find applications and services to fill the new ‘pipes' - a ‘build it and they will come' proposition.

But already a variety of organisations are working on applications and services that utilise that additional bandwidth.

A personal connection

This is one of the fundamental tasks of the Smart Services CRC, a joint Government and privately funded research centre in Sydney. Warren Bradey, chief executive of the Smart Services CRC, says the most obvious applications are in personalised training and healthcare.

"There is such a huge need in aged and chronic care for people to be looked after in their homes, rather than building new infrastructure," says Bradey. "A lot of work will be able to be moved to smaller businesses who will form part of the care plan for the aged and chronically ill."

Bradey says one of the other likely outcomes is that services will start to bunch together into bigger tasks. He gives the example of the birth of a child, where services could be pulled together so that tasks such as the generation of a birth certificate could also trigger registration for post-natal care and immunisation programs, and possibly even childcare and education.

"We'll be able to pull Government services together and assemble them around an area of interest," says Bradey. "But for a consumer you don't want to be cobbling together six or seven bits of a service to create a whole service.

"You can become more of a virtual organisation and yet have more control."

"The NBN will encourage businesses to be much more open about collaboration, and recognise the fact that there is a huge place for small and medium enterprises because they can provide really specialised services that are high quality, and have them aggregated across a trusted intermediary."

Moving data around more efficiently

The broader possibilities seem limitless. The director of Asia Pacific marketing at Alcatel-Lucent, Geof Heydon, suggests an application for the panel beating industry that could manage the photographic records of crashes and link repairers, the authorities and the insurance companies.

"Every single little industry has its own flavour of that," says Heydon. "Everything from being able to share photos about the quality of apples coming out of the orchard, to a claim coming in on
a smash repair."

Many of the new services will seem quite mundane, but could grow rapidly, such as storing data online. Google, Amazon and Microsoft (through its SkyDrive service) enable people to store gigabytes of data on the web. As bandwidth becomes faster and cheaper, it will become common for businesses to back up their data to web services.

This is certainly the hope of Adelaide-based start-up Memory Box Backup, which has created an online storage service for consumers and businesses to safely protect their files off premises by encrypting them and storing on the web itself.

"At the moment, all online backup products are restricted by the customers' upload bandwidth," says managing director Trevor Glen.

"Ubiquitous high-speed networks will mean that the bottleneck will no longer be at the edges of the network, but ... may be in the data centres as they try to cope with hundreds of thousands of people on fast connections trying to upload their files onto the backup servers."

Software - and more - as a service

Another likely outcome is that the NBN will accelerate uptake of software-as-a-service (SaaS) computing, where the software resides on the internet and is accessed through a web browser. Higher speeds mean increasingly complex applications can be delivered online, delivering power that was once reserved for larger corporations.

The most prominent examples of SaaS are Google Apps and the customer management software from Salesforce.com.

Local examples include online accounting software from Saasu or client tracking software from Hiive Systems. Microsoft recently announced that many of its Office applications will be made available online, and both Telstra and NEC provide a range of SaaS applications through their respective T-Suite and Applications net services.

Simon Olive, the strategic channel sales manager at NEC, believes internet-based telephony services (also called VoIP) will be a big winner from the improved speed and reliability of the NBN.

NEC already sells an online service that performs the functions of a PABX, such as voicemail and call routing.

"Once people are connecting up to 100Mbps pipes, they will start to question the value of connecting to the copper [telephone] network to run voice over it as well," says Olive.

But Olive believes the introduction of video into office communications will have the biggest impact.

"For its effectiveness, video interaction is probably where a lot of applications are going to go," says Olive.

Already YouTube and catch-up TV services have proven to be enormously popular with consumers, but video will play a much bigger role in business applications.

The director of platform research at Salesforce.com, Peter Coffee, says his company is thinking about adding video and other rich media to the next generation of its products.

"We're putting a tremendous amount of technology development and understanding of customer need into what happens after you win the customer - what we call the service cloud offering," says Coffee.
"We can offer a business the ability to be monitoring and harvesting feedback from customers on Twitter and on Facebook, and integrating all of that into highly accessible, interactive experiences."