Comment: Australia's NBN Mess

The bungling of the NBN goes back to at least 1994 when I wrote to the then Prime Minister, the Hon. Paul Keating, MP, in my capacity as a journalist specialising in computer and communications technologies, to offer my opinion that Australia should install a fibre-optic broadband network across the nation – a NBN – and not waste any time or money modifying the existing network of hybrid coaxial cables.

As Stephen Shankland wrote in C|Net in 2014, ‘Fibre-optic lines offer much higher data rates than the copper wiring that’s more common for bringing broadband internet access to homes. Copper wiring is more convenient, since it’s typically already installed for phone and cable TV service, but fibre optics can reach longer distances and enable data rates of 100 megabits per second to 1 gigabyte per second. According to Shankland, Japan led the world in 2014 with 68.5 % penetration of fibre-optic links. South Korea followed with 62.8% and Sweden third with 35.9%.

Networking Australia with fibre-optic was a hugely expensive proposition in 1994 but I believe it would have propelled Australia into the new technological paradigm with a massive infrastructure advantage. If a fibre-optic network had been installed then the cost in today’s terms would have dwarfed the amounts that have been wasted on short-term ‘hybrid’ solutions and ‘dodgy’ economics. It reminds me of the economics of buying a sweater: it’s better to spend $150 on a classic (Australian) wool sweater that lasts a decade than $99 on a synthetic sweater that may be ‘on trend’ but has to thrown out at the end of winter because it’s lost it’s shape as well as its fashion relevance.

When I wrote to the Prime Minister in 1994, I was a journalist and academic specialising in technology and my opinion was based on research at high-level multidisciplinary conferences and facilities in the USA and Europe. I interviewed computer scientists and engineers who were developing the Internet and imagining its future beyond any technology that has appeared today. Over the next twenty years the projects that had been presented as ‘tomorrow’s realities’ at the conferences I attended became our ‘today’s realities’ including Netflix, Spotify, Virtual Reality surgery, intradermal chips and robotic warfare.

I listened to the plans for fibre-optic networks that provided unimaginable speed and bandwidth and I followed the experiments that connected first small areas and then whole cities. It was clear that a country networked with fibre-optic would have a distinct advantage in the future knowledge economy and almost all commercial enterprise. I could see Australia – with its high ratio of inventors per capita – becoming a leader in the exciting new economy.

Unfortunately, at that time, the Prime Minister was meeting with Mr Rupert Murdoch and possibly Mr Packer; media moguls who I believe at that time grasped the technological change ahead but not the details and were anxious to maintain control.

A few months after writing to the Prime Minister, I received a polite 'Thank you but not interested' letter from one of his policy advisors. By that time I'd been headhunted by the Netherlands Design Institute (funded by the Dutch Ministry of Culture) in Amsterdam and was running a new media programme there including an international think-tank/ conference on new technologies. In my role, I was invited to give presentations at the Netherlands Ministries of Economics, Infrastructure and Culture along with my colleagues from journalism and the arts because our expertise in the ‘new media’ was sought-after and valued by the Government.

It is heart-breaking to see the mess that is the NBN today resulting from a lack of vision, listening to commercial interests rather than independent experts and the relentless politicisation of an issue so important that it could have transformed Australia’s economy in the globalised post-industrial context.

I don’t have the expertise to advise the Prime Minister today but my suggestion would be to embark on worldwide investigation and cost-benefit analysis of the current state of the NBN and Australia’s technological requirements forty to seventy years into the future; to find the contemporary equivalent of the conferences I attended in the 1990s and to implement the findings.

Finally, I can’t help myself from making another suggestion: at the same time as laying down the broadband network – whether it ends up being fibre-optic, copper or a hybrid – please take advantage of the opportunity to put the electricity cables underground as well. Two cables in one trench: how innovative and cost saving would that be?