Why we need ultrafast broadband

He questions the benefits of broadband, and references the MOTU report [compiled for the Ministry of Economic Development and subtitled "Need for speed: Impacts of Internet Connectivity on Firm Productivity"] without referencing the considerable body of work done by the NZ Institute.

Both studies are flawed. The MOTU report tries to find productivity changes in companies who adopt broadband, nevertheless with a methodology that would fail to fond productivity improvements with the arrival of the PC. If they actually believe this at that time perhaps MOTU staff would like to ensure that their office and all of their homes are connected with dial-up.

Frankly I had thought the time for these sorts of arguments had long past – the MOTU report was back in 2009 and the Australian election, which was won on the commitment to the NBN project, shows that most people understand. To hear someone like Ben, who is a cloud computing advocate, try to reason that 1 Mbit/s is enough for anyone was a bit shocking.

At one end is your ‘Grandma’, for all that on dial-up and maybe just migrating to broadband now so that she can maintain a low resolution Skype chat with your children. As well on that end are families that cannot afford broadband connections, when all is said and done their kids are unable to properly join the online world.

They might need it for media consumption, for work or for Skyping their grandkids on high definition. Or like as not they are creating a business that requires those services. Or like as not it’s like the majority of Christchurch schools who want to get HD video connections so that students from one school can attend classes over video conferencing with teachers and students from another school, saving us money and increasing the knowledge of our kids. That’s happening right now, thanks to some tireless workers and the support of Enable’s fibre to the schools project.

Falling behind However regardless of where we are on that curve, that entire bell curve moves each day, as the carriers deliver and we require higher and higher speeds, and as we increasingly accept always-on high speed internet as a requirement.

Sufficient today is insufficient tomorrow It’s critical that we all understand that what’s sufficient today is insufficient tomorrow. Such as we all laugh now at Bill Gate’s assertion at 640 Kbytes should be enough for anybody, we in the innovation and business communities as well natively understand that in 5 or 10 years time 1 Mbit/s is going to be ludicrously slow. Imagine trying to load the homepage of Stuff on a 9.6 kpbs connection. Imagine trying to watch SHDTV emergency alerts about the latest ChCh earthquake over a 1 Mbit/s connection.

The innovation that can deliver the most capacity

However it’s as well consistently true that fibre is the innovation that can deliver the most capacity, and by quite a margin. It’s expensive to deploy, however once in the ground it’s relatively cheap to upgrade. In the meantime in New Zealand the copper network to the home is most often ductless – and in this way exposed to be corroded and difficult to maintain. There’s a place for wireless, be it networks generated in the home or business, or cellular networks that cover the populated country or, via satellite, an entire hemisphere.

He is as well a co-founder of Pacific Fibre, which aims to connect Australia and New Zealand to the USA with a very high capacity fiber, and an InternetNZ Councillor. He blogs at LanceWiggs.com.

The problem NZ as well has is we are tasking Telecom to roll it out and manage it - past history and as a matter of fact recent history as recent as yesterday on our current broadband platform says " why would you trust Telecom?"

Australia's spend is huge compared with NZ's nevertheless it's lazy capital. There is no need to bankrupt the country to get this thing built - I fear the Australians are trying to solve a lot of problems by throwing cash at it.

The fibre is in the ground -

Once the fibre is in the ground - and in ducts or rather than buried, at the time it's easy to upgrade the innovation on each end - or to pull more through. This is a pretty future-proof solution.