Hansard of House NBN committee meeting in Adelaide:
http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/reps/commttee/R13704.pdf
Mr Lindsay of Internode (p1:)
Internode have built and we operate several licensed spectrum WiMAX networks, and we are
quite intimately aware of the advantages and limitations of wireless technology, so naturally we
are very supportive of the fibre-to-the-premises network
So those involved in wireless networking know its limitations and are very supportive of the NBN. Hmmm. Amazing the fanbois opposing the NBN on party-political grounds (death to honest thinking) laud wireless while those looking at the NBN with clear eyes are quite happy to use wireless when out and about but want the huge bandwidth the NBN brings when at home or at the office. The NBN has already won Australia more than one huge data centre and gives us a great chance at the square kilometer array—now what Australian doesn’t applaud these advances? I get ITNews emailed to me each weekday and can see Cloud computing is the coming big thing—cloud requires ubiquitous high bandwidth aka fibre!
Later:
Another emerging service is off-site backup. There is an Adelaide company called Memory
Box which has developed that service. If your house is burgled or it burns down, if your backups
are in the house, you might not only lose your computer with the data but your backups to.
Services like Memory Box need fast, fat connections
Business data or family snapshots, both precious in different ways to different people—need “fast, fat connections” aka NBN! Even a snapshot that you want to back up at the original file size, ever growing as digicams get more and more megapixels, even cheap ones have 14mpx now requires a fast network, not to mention digital movie cameras and their even bigger files—then there are professional photographers!
Now Lindsay is attacking the NBN pricing model and nothing wrong with that. He is not attacking the NBN rather the opposite!
P6:
CHAIR—One of the interesting areas of evidence we have had is around cost savings and
efficiencies to businesses in not having to fly people all over the place to participate in meetings.
Also, there is the ability to access expertise and top-notch people in a field without requiring
them to relocate and live wherever the business is. Are those the sorts of testimonials you have
received? I am just trying to get a sense of the flavour of those.
Mr Lindsay—It is somewhat early days for video conferencing. Internode operates
telepresence between all of its capital city offices. We have directly calculated the cost savings
from that and it runs to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in airfares and hotel
accommodation. You get a fascinating response when you invite someone to a meeting and you
send them the address of your office in Sydney and they are shown into a room with you smiling
at them from a very large screen. It is a completely different way of working, but using
telepresence requires bandwidth that approaches 50 megabits. Today, that is affordable in a
corporate setting but it is not really affordable in a domestic setting. The NBN will enable that
CHAIR—Or in a community setting?
Mr Lindsay—Indeed. The cost of telepresence and video conferencing is just crashing
through the floor at the moment. There are numerous vendors who are providing services that
only two years ago would have been only usable in a corporate environment; they are now
providing that to small business and domestic users.
Unfucking real!
Now we get Deputy Chair, National Party, Neville, Mr Paul, Member for Hinkler
P7:
Mr NEVILLE—I think I get where you are coming from, but let me ask a second question.
You said in your opening remarks that you are a supporter of the NBN and structural separation,
notwithstanding the fact that you complained about the charging mechanisms of the NBN. How
did you, a company with so much contact with the corporate sector and government, react to the
announcement about 10 days ago that the NBN was talking about dealing directly at a retail level
with certain entities? What is your reaction to that?
Mr Lindsay—It depends on what those entities are actually going to use the NBN network
for. We are very comfortable with the energy sector using the NBN to enable things like smart
metering—
Mr NEVILLE—Purchasing at the wholesale rate?
Mr Lindsay—We do not find that troubling. What concerns us is when that is then extended
into providing retail internet services leveraged from what they receive from providing the smart
metering type services.
Mr NEVILLE—How would you react to a state government becoming its own internet
provider, through the NBN, wholesaling services for the whole of its departments and making
itself the retailer?
Mr Lindsay—We find it troubling—but then everyone finds change troubling
Change can indeed be troubling—the rut is very comforting. Then some bastard changes thing—and we end back up, after a a few bumps and lumps in a more comfortable rut
P14, a lot of text I can’t really summarise, but CLARK, Mr Richard Anthony (Tony), Director, Co-founder, Rising Sun Pictures is talking about the growth of networks and how he can now send 2K high quality video directly using a Fibre Optic network established by the SA govt—I suggest you read it. He says:
Mr Clark—Indeed. What would have happened is that a company such as ours would have
had to go to where the market is. What we have done through the use of broadband is enable the
market to come to us. These days the market goes to everybody—in China, India, Eastern
Europe and all sorts of destinations—as long as they can get that kind of access. What it meant
at the time was that, if you were a practitioner working in those created areas, you went to the
client. You went to Los Angeles. A significant number of very talented Australians moved to Los
Angeles and San Francisco, to the major companies, and made their lives there. Many of them
have not come back. Being able to do this from an effective price point enabled us, as a growing
company—not a company with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of backing and hundreds
of staff—to bootstrap this industry
Bit later (pIC 17:)
CHAIR—One of the things that has been said to us by vocational education providers online
is that that they have now stopped relocating people when good quality broadband is available in
their hometown; they will actually employ them, and they stay in their home town and interact.
Is that a possibility?
Mr Clark—I think that there is a very real possibility. I am always wanting to push this some
years out into the future because I believe we need to be thinking about what our opportunities
are going to be in five to 10 years if we want to start to enable them now. We need to build the
underlying applications that will support that model. We have people right now whom we
relocate from rural Tasmania. We have people we are relocating from rural New South Wales.
We have pockets of artists all around Australia and, rather than sticking them on aeroplanes and
flying them here, we could be either working with them as individuals or working with them in
small clusters of two, three or four people and having them located in that area. In order to do
that, you need to have a mechanism for effective creative collaboration such as cineSync. You
also need to have affordable broadband, because, if you consider the costs of putting somebody
in our office, my housing cost monthly is probably in the order of a couple of hundred bucks to
keep a roof over their head and give them electricity and a seat and a space at a desk. When
setting a costing, these people need to be connected at reasonable speeds where we have a
predictable quality of service, predictable availability of bandwidth and predictable latency;
otherwise they are not going to be able to be effective.
That is what I have been banging on about, people able to shun the problem-riddled and services-poor outer suburbs to find cheaper housing and a much better lifestyle in the regions. NBN will enable that, but states will need to upgrade tracks and rolling stock and improve or re-introduce regional rail services for the times workers or physical goods need to move to and from head office.
It is up to the govt, ISPs, industry etc etc to talk about potential uses and move to introduce them to get the demand started—to move people into that more comfortable rut they first have to be kicked or enticed out of the present one. NBN Co too have a big role in provoking demand for FO superfast networks.
