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October 23, 2006
Queensland's broadband plan: the good and the bad
It's interesting reading some of the early comments regarding Queensland's plan for super-fast broadband. They range from despair...:
"Fix the basic problems first schools where children actually read and write. Water!!! Roads without potholes!"
...to joy:
"What a wonderful idea! Broadband access in this country explodes the myth that private enterprise delivers the best product at the best price. There is a role for Government in delivering essential services where the private sector is too consumed by control and profit."
Of course, the smart move would have been to separate out the infrastructure (the actual cabling across the nation) from all of Telstra's other assets, so that the government could maintain ownership of the core infrastructure. Could you imagine the government privatizing the entire road system to one company? Of course not! But what they've done with Telstra is much the same thing.
So now governments have to rebuild it from scratch - Queensland's plan to lay a fast fiber-optic network sounds like the right way to go. They get a great competitive advantage in attracting business investment (I know our company for instance may well have located in Queensland if they had this network when we started), consumers get access to new applications (like video-on-demand and video-conferencing), and it can be achieved efficiently by taking advantage of power-lines, railway track sidings, and other public assets.
My main concern is the cost - $550m for coverage of 2-3 million people; if around a third take it up, that's around $500 per person for the network alone (the real cost would probably be at least twice this, due to distribution and other costs). If they just used fiber for the main backbones, and wireless networking for everything else, they'd keep the cost well down, and have the benefit of wireless access for consumers as well.
Posted by Jeremy at October 23, 2006 02:14 AM
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