Australia is currently designing a National Broadband Network that will see us as world leaders in broadband communication in a few years’ time. But now that the Coalition have revealed their plans to slash expenditure in this venture, we may find ourselves with a system that falls well short of the mark.
The Coalition wants to offer a poor quality service – a system that will be slow and ugly before it even goes live. Essentially, they propose to put a mediocre system in place for the marginalised rural and outer suburban dwellers, and leave it to private enterprise to provide better quality solutions to the more urbanised areas. They have agreed to lay out thousands of kilometres of fibre, but will leave the rest of the job to private companies who will have to build local wireless distribution points, which, according to Rod Tucker of The Age, would create “ugly street scapes across the nation”.
The wireless and satellite systems being proposed by the Coalition are not going to cope with the data load that will be required in the years ahead. It would leave us with a system that would need an upgrade from the day it went live. In my business we work hard to create systems with a high ROI and low total cost of ownership, but this proposal offers the opposite – a low ROI and a high total cost of ownership.
I see this leading to a divided community, where communication and public transport will be great in some parts, but poor in others. This will have a spill over effect on the quality of education and other public services, creating gaping disparities within our population. If we want to ignore the rural sector and marginalise non-urban dwellers, this would be the way to do it.
What we have is two markedly different options. One the one hand, we have the government proposing to create a modern, high-quality broadband network. On the other, we have the opposition attempting to add to their poor record in building Australia’s communication infrastructure. Part of this record includes their previous decision to not split Telstra into wholesale and retail organisations, the consequences of which have left Australia with the communications train wreck it has today.
Australia needs high quality broadband infrastructure in both urban and rural areas, to benefit the citizens of both. Development of our regional areas will ensure our population can continue to expand without pushing the demand for city real estate through the roof. And it’s imperative that workers in regional areas have access to their business data, without having to travel into town to connect. It seems remarkable that a party claiming to have the best interests of SMEs at heart doesn’t seem to have grasped the potential of IT for serving their mantras about building the economy and reducing waste.
I am not in favour of a government-owned communications monopoly, but I am keen to see high bandwidth delivered to businesses Australia-wide as quickly as possible, to facilitate the use of modern IT solutions.
As a provider of IT services to small and medium businesses, I am all too aware that the cost to small business of managing IT in-house is too high. As it stands, with distributed technology, such as in-house servers and phone systems, due to slow broadband services, IT is costing small business between $1,000 and $3,000 per employee per year. IT needs to be made more affordable and more scalable, and it is only through high bandwidth that this is likely to become a reality. Provided that the NBN is put in place correctly, I believe that the costs of IT can be cut in half providing a saving of $500 to $1,500 per SME employee per year.
If the opposition gets their way, it would be like all of us driving the distances we do today at 100 km/h in a model T Ford. It’s simply unsustainable. It would not be too long before we strip it down to a chassis, and re-build from the wheels up to get the features we want.
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David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.
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