A national broadband network (NBN) offers rural Australia a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put itself on a more equal footing with urban centres: don’t let the chance slip by, a leading telecommunications consultant warns.
Paul Budde, who runs his international consultancy BuddeComm from Bucketty, in the lower Hunter Valley, said regardless of the flavour of the NBN, it is a concept that has tremendous scope for driving development in the bush.
“We’ll only get one chance at this,” Mr Budde said. “It’s not a matter of fiddling around now and letting it go, hoping that in five years time someone will come back with $5 billion to fix it for us.
“In 2005, regional Australia was in the lead, telling Canberra what it needed. Unfortunately, people like Barnaby Joyce and Fiona Nash fell by the wayside, and we lost that momentum for regional broadband. It’s a worry to me, that we don’t have that momentum now.”
To be successful, the NBN “needs to drive fibre as deep as possible into regional Australia”, Mr Budde believes.
“People may say that they don’t want to wait 15 years, and ask for wireless broadband in the interim: I have no issue with that. But the end game should not be a wireless solution for most of regional Australia.”
Wireless is a highly effective solution - Telstra last week ramped up its Next G service to 42 megabits per second - but Mr Budde said the system bogs down if a high number of users are working from the same tower.
The ideal solution, he suggests, is for fibre to service regional population centres, with farms sharing wireless services.
Mr Budde dismissed the Coalition broadband plan, which relies on private enterprise to drive services into the bush, as lacking the necessary scope to create revolutionary change.
However, he said an NBN with a “Coalition flavour” is readily achievable.
Mr Budde also believes that those who dismiss the idea of a nation-building NBN as a grandiose distraction don’t appreciate the power of the idea.
Concepts like “e-health”, where an isolated country GP can talk one-to-one with specialists anywhere in the world, or even provide regular virtual consultations to people confined to their homes, have the potential to dramatically change the nature of rural health services.
It’s ironic, he said, that older generations that have the least interest in the potential of broadband could have a lot to gain from e-health in the last 10 years of their life, typically the most medically expensive years.
Children and teachers in small country schools could get live access to education initiatives from around the world. And a fast fibre network would go a long way towards erasing the rural-urban divide for businesses seeking locations with a lower cost structure.
“People are drawn to living in rural and regional areas; it’s a dream that many have. But fast broadband is critical in making that a reality.”
Innovative thinking will be essential in making the NBN a financial and social success.
In Norway, Lyse Tele has made fibre more affordable to remote locations by allowing households to dig their own trenches - an option that removes about a third of the cost.
Mr Budde said that cooperatives of farmers could easily get together to dig trenches to homesteads, putting a fibre connection within their reach.
“You can skin the cat in many different ways. Just don’t throw the whole thing out and go back to 2005,” he said.
“Something like 400 volunteers have worked on the NBN concept. This is not a Labor or Liberal issue. This is a national issue, and it shouldn’t be killed as the Coalition wants to do.”
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