As the Australia Government ponders who will build its proposed National Broadband Network, JOHN HARRIS asks if it's aiming high enough.

This is a watershed year for broadband in Australia.

A central event is the fate of the Federal Government’s proposed National Broadband Network (NBN), a $4.7 billion Labor election promise to deliver high–speed broadband across the country.

The National Broadband Network promises to provide minimum broadband speeds of 12 megabits per second to 98 per cent of Australian homes and businesses.

"Broadband is a vital digital economy enabler and we need to be acting now to develop our capabilities to utilise our investments," said Broadband Communications and the Digital Economy Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy, a central player in Australia’s broadband future.

Most of last year was spent putting together a process to choose a private partner to actually build the National Broadband Network, bootstrapped by the Government’s $4.7 billion contribution.

In a significant decision last December, Telstra’s NBN proposal was excluded from the evaluation process. Telstra was kicked out for failing to submit a Small and Medium Enterprise Participation Plan, one of five mandatory requirements set by the Government. Remaining participants are national bids from Acacia, Axia, and Optus-Terria and regional bids from TransACT and the Tasmanian Government.

No one disputes the need for Australia to have world-class broadband services and the role for the public sector in ensuring these services are widely available to most if not all Australians.

However, pursuing these laudable goals with the National Broadband Network holds the risk that Australians may spend billions of dollars of increasingly scarce public funds to build a network that actually works against the nation’s long-term interests.

Senator Conroy’s panel of experts has already handed its report on the NBN proposals to his department, which is currently preparing its advice to enable the minister to choose his preferred bidder. Buried in all the technical and financial details are some very important questions for him to consider.

Firstly, what constitutes “high-speed broadband”? Until 2005, it was 1.5 megabits per second. Today, it is anything from 8-18 megabits per second.

However, consumers in broadband-leading countries such as Korea, already take broadband services as fast as 100 megabits per second for granted.

If he is planning for Australia’s future, rather than a multi-billion-dollar extension of the present, perhaps Senator Conroy should set his sights higher than the proposed 12 megabits per second.

With broadband, it’s not the raw data transfer speeds that count, but what you can do with it.  A 12 megabit-per-second service can easily deliver highly responsive web browsing, super-quick downloads and the ability to stream one or two standard definition video streams.

While that provides rocking performance today, it may prove underpowered in five or 10 years when high definition video and virtual reality interactivity are the name of the game.
Another question is what price are consumers prepared to pay?  I know plenty of people who carefully portion out access to their 512 kilobit per second broadband service and a 200 megabyte data allowance because that’s all they want to pay for.

In evaluating the NBN proposals, the Government needs to carefully consider the impact of spending billions of dollars to create a high-speed broadband platform that millions of Australians can’t afford.

Disclosure statement: John Harris is managing director of Impress Media Australia, a PR agency that provides services for Internode, a member of the Terria consortium. You can view his website at www.johnharris.net.au.

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