It seems politicians of all colours for once agree on something most Australians simply must have, FTTN i.e. Fibre to the Node - for those people who haven’t read a newspaper or watched TV for more than thirty minutes in the past few weeks.
Just over three months ago Kevin Rudd released the opposition’s election winning communications vision for the 21st century with a planned $4.7 billion FTTN network to be funded jointly by the Howard Government’s much lauded Future Fund plus $2 billion thrown in from the Communication Fund.
I say ‘election winning’ since the policy was immediately attacked violently by the government solely on the grounds that the Future Fund was somehow sacrosanct - which given they had left bureaucrats’ superannuation unfunded for over a decade themselves and had only finally bitten the bullet and made up the deficiency by selling income earning Commonwealth assets, viz Telstra shares, was a bit rich.
When it became apparent the electorate didn’t really care about the public sector’s under-funded retirements and were actually more interested in much faster and cheaper internet the government quickly decided it was time to get serious and finally stop the salsa with the amigos at Telstra and announce something better – supposedly 1% better anyway.
For the record the ALP is talking about 98 per cent FTTN coverage whilst Communications Minister Senator Helen Coonan is claiming the government can provide 99 per cent, utilising a wireless (WiMAX) hybrid model, with the bush missing out on fibre.
So it seems the country will actually get a world competitive broadband network no matter who wins the next federal election and finally receive something like the service South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore have already enjoyed for years.
But are the current solutions being touted actually the best technology available?
FTTH, which means fibre to the house/home, (i.e. does not rely on copper from the node to the house) from a technical point of view definitely would be superior to FTTN, and apparently was introduced in Japan as far back as 1999. I’m told Australia’s ‘tyranny of distance’ and relatively small and sparse population renders this technology a no-starter at the moment however we will likely end up with it at some time in the future.
All the leading business people I know appreciate technological advances go hand in hand with truly high speed communications and understand if we are to keep up with our Asian neighbours in a global marketplace we must have world class infrastructure.
Clearly it’s time to act with many savvy people in our IT industry maintaining we currently have the slowest and most expensive broadband in the developed world.
It must be said the proposals from both sides of politics do have their drawbacks but either network will be a huge and positive step forward for the country.
Of course, a truly visionary approach would be looking at technologies with the potential to lead the world into the 21st century.
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