This hard-line attitude has also been shown towards communities resisting wireless towers as the Golden Plains Shire in Central Victoria found out. After rejecting NBN Co’s plans to build a tower in the shire Quigley warned that the district was potentially at risk of missing out on having wireless services altogether.
In reply the then Golden Plains Shire mayor, Cr Geraldine Frantz, rejected the idea that the local council was being obstructionist, instead blaming the company for not consulting with the community on the tower’s location.
“NBN Co’s claims that they have taken the time to adequately engage with the community and that it cannot proceed with the Napoleons fixed wireless facility are simply not correct,” Frantz said in a statement.
It’s an incendiary issue and there is ample potential for things blowing up in NBN Co’s face, mainly because hard luck stories from the bush during an election year won’t be appreciated by the Gillard government. So community consultation on the wireless towers and other key infrastructure is going to become critical in 2013.
Who gets fibre or wireless is going to be an issue as well, with many communities earmarked to have wireless connections campaigning to have the faster and more reliable fibre service. Outback Queensland’s McKinlay Shire Council is an early agitator for fibre connections as they lobby to connect the town of Julia Creek.
We can expect more remote communities in 2013 to be asking for the faster services and NBN Co will have to find a mechanism to negotiate cost agreements with state and local governments to provide this option to districts that fall outside the company’s criteria for providing fibre connections.
Getting connections to outback towns is one of the many issues both the minister and NBN Co will have to consider in the noisy and distracting run up to the 2013 election. With the unfortunate politicisation of the project, there will be countless management distractions with various real and confected issues and cheap point scoring during the campaign.
Should the Labor Party lose the election there will be major changes to the NBN as an Abbott government attempts to reduce the scope of the project and install a new executive regime at NBN Co.
Chris Coughlan of communications consultancy firm Telsyte says, “Any significant change in policy, such as the use of Fibre to the Node (FttN) would result in up to a four year delay due to review processes, revised legislation drafting and implementation, and renegotiation of the Telstra and Optus NBN contracts.”
A four-year delay to a project that is already running late would be a blow to many Australian businesses and communities. So there is a lot at stake here and NBN Co needs to clearly demonstrate that it can deliver the project on time and within budget.
A Labor victory brings its own complexities. If the Gillard government is able to orchestrate a win – and it could happen – expenditure is going to come under pressure as mining revenues expected in last year’s budget fail to materialise. The NBN is going to be one of many areas that will come under federal budget pressures.
At a state level, the attempt by the NSW government to overcharge for electricity pole access is an early harbinger of many more attempts by state and local governments to wring much needed revenue out of NBN Co.
Even without the distractions of various governments, 2013 is going to be the year that the NBN starts to deliver on its promises. For the management of NBN Co, their reputations will be built or lost depending on whether the project meets its targets.
This article first appeared on Technology Spectator.
Paul Wallbank writes on how IT affects communities, markets and workplaces. He also helps businesses to grow and engage their customers with technology.
