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August 17, 2010
I watched Tony Abbott on the ABC's Q+ A last night. I was curious as to what he would, as a conservative, say on the welfare state and on Australia's digital futures. This was my criteria of judgment.
Though Abbott put in a professional, workman like performance as a compassionate conservative, the audience did not warm to him, as happened with Julie Gillard in the previous Q + A. Part of the problem was Abbott's ignorance, especially in his response to a national broadband network. He acknowledged that broadband services are going to be incredibly important for our future. So he has stepped outside his conservative base with its traditional social values, dislike of change, its risk averse approach to life and like to follow rules and the path most travelled.
Having rejected the stance of the digital laggards Abbott then said wireless would be do the job required:
I think, though, that the best result is much more likely to be achieved by competitive markets than by a government monopoly and, sure, high speed fibre is very, very important but most of the people who you see making use of these services at the moment are doing it via wireless technology. I mean, all of the people who are using their Blackberry's or their iPhones for Facebook. All of the people who are sitting in cafes and hotel rooms doing their work, they're all using wireless technology and we shouldn't assume that the only way of the future is high speed cable.
This is true. It works when we are "on the road" with our laptops and smart phones. What wireless supports is low bandwidth associated with mobility. In this case mobility is traded off against bandwidth.
But we also have homes with multiple users and in this location wireless is limited in terms of its functionality and speed. It is at this point that realize that wireless ends up running into capacity constraints due to a lack of spectrum, and the large downloads make broadband prohibitively expensive for most people.
Abbott's response to this digital faultline is that:
I'm not sure that we should assume that just because wireless is today slower than fibre cable that it's always going to be slower than fibre cable and even if we could get 100 megabits or more here our speeds are still limited by the connectivity of the sites that we're using and apparently some 70 per cent of the sites that Australian's use are hosted overseas, so they're dependent upon more than just our own broadband.
The overseas cable link is a problem. But I thought that a high-speed underwater fibre cable capable of carrying Australian internet traffic overseas at speeds of more than a terabit per second is in the process of being built by Pacnet and Pacific Fibre. Presumably more such cables will be built by the market as the demand rises from those using the national broadband network.
Geoff Huston, an expert in internet architectures at APNIC, has said that it was extremely challenging to "get high speed data through the air" and the limited availability of wireless spectrum meant we would fast run into capacity problems.
What's going to happen with wireless is that as we crowd it, only those with the deepest pockets will be able to afford it, so rather than being a communications medium for everyone, it becomes only a medium for the few who can afford to pay.For the same $50 a month that people pay for a couple of gigabytes of wireless, they can get 10-20 times that amount of data down the wire - wireless has its role but it also attracts a premium price.
I cannot afford to do my weblogs (research and uploading) and my photography (downloading and uploading) on wireless on a daily basis in Adelaide. I rely on ADSL2+ and I can just manage my work with it.
All the focus in Q + A was on the technology (speed+ technological development) rather than on content and enabling more Australians to use it, more creatively and on fostering research and applications in user-led innovation for the creative industries. Abbot's limitations were apparent when he failed to to link e-health developments to the National Broadband Network (NBN). He did not seem to realize that early diagnosis and after-treatment patient monitoring are two areas where significant synergies may be found using applications provided to users at home.
At no time did Abbott mention the emergence of a knowledge based digital economy implies an economy where the benefits of digitisation, and in particular the internet, become part of most if not all areas of economic activity. He had no idea of Australia as a leading knowledge based digital economy in the 21st century based on innovation, creativity and education in digital skills and literacy.
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Warning!
Incoming derail.
http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/08/17/the-campaign-against-stimulus-contradictory-confused-and-callous/
Bernard Keane has redeemed his recent efforts with an outstanding article, quite brilliant and even a touch of the passionate.
Which is more than can be said for Abbott's effort last night, boringly predictable recitation of meaningless mantras that betray total non-comprehension of the issues facing Australia and a constsnt attempt to look backwards rather than forwards.