The Coalition and Broadband
Australia needs a real plan to invest in a National Broadband Network (NBN) with fibre optic and wireless phases.
There they go again. They were in government for thirteen years and failed to understand the importance of high speed broadband for social and economic development and well-being – and they still don’t get it, it seems.
The “plan” announced by Mr Abbott last week, through proxies, is a mishmash of half-baked notions, not a plan.
I advised Senator Alston almost a decade ago that if Australia did not invest in broadband and allowed Telstra to persist with its anti-competitive behaviour we would be at risk of becoming a third-world country. Anyone who travels to Europe, North America or even Asia will know that I was right.
This is not to say that wireless has no place in the future of the nation as a connected society. In fact, the sole criticism I have of Labor’s NBN is that it places too little emphasis on the potential of wireless broadband.
While optic fibre is the optimum solution for homes and businesses, future generations will demand ubiquitous connectivity and that is possible only with wireless technologies.
Anyone familiar with the history of the radio will understand that. For a while, radio connections by wire were promoted as the best option for quality broadcasting…and they were. But people in their millions preferred to listen to music on cheap portable transistor radios. Why? Because they could listen to music when and where they wanted, without being hooked to the end of a wired connection.
Of course, nowadays we can have our cake and eat it too. We can listen to high quality music broadcasts, for example, on portable digital devices. So, a truly future-proof plan for national connectivity should include a second phase that relies on wireless technology as a complement to wired technologies.
As a stepping stone, governments should fund a program to provide all metropolitan CBDs (and then regional CBDs) with high speed, free, wireless broadband. If we want to signal to the world that Australia is focused on the future, this would do it.
Meanwhile, let’s make sure that we do not truly become a third world country – whoever wins the election must continue with the NBN. If that does not happen, our children will scorn us as future eating troglodytes.
