Wednesday Forum: the NBN and New England

Today's post on my personal blog, Frustrations over the NBN discussion, deals with the National Broadband Network, using Armidale as an example. If you look at my post, UNE's strategic positioning, you will get a further background feel as to why I think that this is such a make or break issue for parts of New England.

What is your view on the NBN? Do you see it as helpful for your area? How might we use it to pursue New England development?

Postcript One

In a comment, David Carse from Waterfall Way Designs put up a pretty good summary of the benefits as he saw them.  He also provided a link through to a post, What does NBN mean for your business?, explaining the benefits to his clients.

Postscript two: Issues Summary

While this post will remain open for comment, I now want to draw together some threads, adding from my own experience in running a business out of Armidale and as a consultant. As I did in the first post,  Frustrations over the NBN discussion, I am using Armidale as an example because I know it quite well and because the city itself already has better than average internet connections.

As a starting comment, if you listen to the discussions on NBN, you will generally find:

1. A focus on the ordinary consumer. In fact, from a New England perspective, it is the business applications that are most critical since these provide jobs.
2. An often implicit assumption or myopia that regional areas don't actually need fast connections because the type of business that demands them is not to be found there.

If you look at discussion to this point from David and in my original post:

1. As a consultant, David finds existing connections mean that both video conferencing and VOIP (voice over internet protocol) are patchy and somewhat unreliable. This would fit with my recent experience with in-house video conferencing linking a Sydney head office with regional branches in Dubbo, Coffs and Tamworth. The links were jerky and kept falling over. 
2. Both UNE and its students say that the existing system does not allow the University to provide the type of interactive teaching experience that distance students need.

Both of these are current examples where demands have out-run capacity.

We live in a distributed, data intense world. From my own experience, the types of applications that are constrained even in a place like Armidale include:

1. Collaborative software development in a distributed environment.
2. Bandwith intensive visual applications - games, development of other entertainment, certain types of courseware.
3. Bandwith intensive data process and distributing applications.
4. Collaborative distributed team working involving combined forms of media. 
5. Use of cloud computing. 
6. E-commerce or retailing activities requiring certain real time delivery, again where the traffic volume and speed passes a certain point. 

Many things come into play in considering this type of application. Scale is one. You start okay, but then run up against capacity constraints as you grow. As a consequence, you then move.

Armidale has lost a fair number of start-up businesses over the last twenty years because of locational issues. Had they not moved, or survived and stayed in Armidale, the city would have been a lot larger. Poor communications was only one factor, but an important one. In one year, my own business spent $46,000 on domestic air travel.

I will leave this post here, although comments are still open.