From the blog:
First up, we’re not going to be able to show this importance with what seems to be the flavour du jour, ye old Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA). Lately, emerging from the woodwork have crawled a phalanx of economists running around flailing their abacuses, pointing at the NBN and proclaiming - but where’s your CBA? but where’s your CBA? All this noise however, instead of convincing you of a CBA’s utility, tends to just remind you of the one done long ago on their own profession. That verdict? Pretty Dismal.
This is a profession whose models almost unanimously failed to predict the greatest financial meltdown since the Depression. A more recent example is Treasury underestimating revenue from the proposed mining tax by a lazy 2 Billion. The nation’s chief bean counters can shift their fiscal position on a single tax to the tune of 2 thousand million dollars … within 7 weeks. Hence it should go without saying that the cascading, far-reaching effects of a much more influential NBN can never be decisive, save for what its continual championing says of a profession flapping about in the face of its repeated failures.
The implications of all this are, as we have been trying to say, thrillingly difficult to predict but existing trends and scientific developments point to applications of the following nature: massive efficiency gains in energy usage by smart-homes plugged in to a national energy grid; automated, longitudinal models for disease prevention and detection through connecting body functioning with chemical exposures and food intakes; artificial intelligence modelling our cognitive processes to assist us with next moves in financial management, educational interactions and software sitting in the cloud; an explosion in telemetry with devices remote and near, bobbing, hovering, towering and burrowing while silently monitoring climate change and the nation’s biodiversity; businesses seamlessly applying the latest algorithms from similarly connected research institutions; and finally, returning to our original example, a next-generation democracy in which mooted policies and all their flow-on, interactive effects can be judged and voted on using models of unheard of transparency and sophistication.
And this is what I have been arguing consistently here and on PA, that the Libs version of an NBN won’t do, apart from not spending anywhere near enough money to fix up the many ills of the copper CAN:
What is not debatable however, is that a photon era will never occur under such a rollout. It cannot occur not only due to a resulting bandwidth of insufficient size, but also because of its asymmetrical nature. That is, copper technology only supports download speeds of this order whereas these data-intensive application intrinsically require similar upload transfers. The choice is therefore alarmingly stark. Without an NBN we are consigning ourselves to an electron era in perpetuity; with an NBN, a society-transforming photon-era beckon.
As Australia’s natural resources dwindle and deplete, there will come a time this century when our grandchildren will need to live more off their wits than our resources have spared us from doing so. They will have to compete with countries, less resource-blessed and hence with generations of practice in technological innovation. The NBN once built will be a pivotal competitive advantage and therefore a natural platform for ensuring the “luck” continues. It could also be argued that in the interests of generational equity, it’s the least we can do. The NBN - a colossal White Elephant? … more like a post-mineral White Knight.
Now we gotta get it built despite the troglodytes on teh right:
One might hope that politicians could sense that the game-changing transitions from Post to the Telegraph to Email were ultimately “just” means of faster information transfer? - means that transformed a planet into a Global village. That what distinguishes our species` consciousness, our emergent intelligence is the scope and speed of our synaptic exchanges? The hope is likely to be dashed: Here is some Coalition synapic activity?
This idea that ‘hey presto’ we are suddenly going to get ten times the speed from something that isn’t even built yet I find utterly implausible.
Tony - I’m no Bill Gates - Abbott expounding on the implausibility of the laws of physics.
And then there is his predecessor and now chief demolisher
While lofty rhetoric about vision, imagination and the digital future is all very well …will Gigabit fixed line speeds, for which households can't yet envisage a use, be valued above the convenience of mobility, for instance?
The reality is, there simply isn’t demand at the household and every small business level for Internet at that speed …
Malcolm - I am Bill Gates - Turnbull prognosticating on the future of information flow.
So:
Huh? A photon era is either impossible or it is possible but pointless? In a nutshell it seems that what the Coalition is really saying (on either of these contradicting positions) is that well folks, that’s it for this Interwebs thing. That explosion, that transformation of the electron age - just a curious historical quirk - from now on it’s all steady as she goes mate - browsers won’t change much, might get a little quicker for movie downloads, a few more facebook profiles might sprout, email traffic and online newspapers will keep going gangbusters but apart from that cobber, it’s pretty much all she wrote.
It’s hard to imagine a political body any more decrepit. Credit’s due where credit’s due though, this at least represents some sort of maturation: this conception of the Internet is now frozen in the 90’s.
That every now and then an enabling technology comes along whose very foundational nature, potentially so critical to a nation’s way of life, is precisely why it could never be built by the private sector in the first place. If an NBN doesn’t fit such a bill then it is difficult to conceive of a project that ever will. The Coalition’s brand now seems to include a view of government that never involves national infrastructure.
How hard would it really be to acknowledge that the left has come up with a little beauty on this one and to instead argue, that the party of prudence and “build-it-and-they-will-come” optimism, would be the best one instinctively to carry it out? The Australian electorate might even forgive them such a nuance.
As if, the Libs never ever nation build! They hold on to what they have and shut their eyes to changes.
And the Opposition Orifice, whose founder remember slammed the Libs for our paltry broadband:
Perhaps buoyed by the closeness of the last election and the partisan backing of The Australian, the Coalition seem to be banking on a repeat performance in waging a war on the NBN. Certainly of late this broadsheet seems unusually keen to provide a platform for the nay-sayer’s over-represented bleatings. The Australian has run upwards of fifty stories against the NBN since the August election. Authoritative headlines such as “We’ll pay dearly for this folly”, “NBN sums don’t add up” “Seven reasons why the NBN will fail” (surely one would have sufficed Malcolm?) have almost become daily fare.
. . .a partisan player commencing a war of attrition on one of the key platforms of the party it has taken to supporting of late. A war that assumes special piquancy given the NBN’s shocking potential to reduce the influence of big, established news organisations, especially those unwilling or incapable of changing their business models.
Given the manifest benefits of a NBN to the nation, that alternative technologies are ruled out by the laws of physics and that, unlike virtually every other media outlet in the country, the ratio of articles is running at 10% for verses 90% against; the balance of probabilities suggests the latter. On this issue at least, The Coalition and The Australian are like two mating hawks inextricably entwined in a spectacular death-spiral.
To flog another metaphor, in all likelihood their combined opposition isn’t even flogging a dead horse for it has already bolted. It does however, make you wonder at the complacency of all the CSIRO scientists, the academics and (less so) the technologists in what seems like lack of public engagement on the NBN. A groundswell of public contributions on this issue, would counter the Abacus flappers, but more importantly, move the NBN beyond redundant justifications. To instead, move onto formenting a brainstorming on how best to utilize this upcoming, amazing new resource.
Ronald Monson concludes:
Far more productive would be to hear more enthusiasts sprouting and debating new ideas and NBN possibilities. Such a conversation would really start to emphasise the value, not to mention the poetic magic, of subterranean flashes of light crisscrossing the country in carrying, connecting and igniting a nation’s spirit. If a number must be put on this, forget billions - it’s got to be in the trillions.
Well, I have tried my bit, emphasising not just the bandwidth but the symmetry of the NBN and what that offers.
Naysayers keep on crapping on about wireless, mixing up mobile 3G with fixed 4G wireless to boot, which has neither bandwidth whatever claims of peak speeds are sprouted nor symmetry. While wireless
connections increase in number the amount of data transferred by wireless is stagnant, data is increasingly carried by DSL, wires. The NBN is wires on steroids—plus that symmetry!
And Ronald has given one more use for the NBN’s symmetry—the collection and sharing of real time data!
...but then you would be able to fill your posts with lies and half truths