[LINK] The PLAN, and broadband speeds?

[David Lochrin]

On Wednesday 20 June 2007 12:54, Karl Auer wrote:
> There is an elephant in the room with this whole "broadband" thing.
> [...]
>
> Much has been spoken of "vision". If there was any "vision" out there it
> would be talking many tens of megabits if not gigabits. It would be
> looking ten years and twenty years into the future, not two. It would
> not be even *suggesting* satellite links, with their horrific latency
> and low bandwidth. [...]
> 
> Vision would be understanding how the payoff would be enormous. Vision
> would be seeing how this would get people *out* of our congested cities,
> how it would open up new markets all over the country, how it would
> inspire people to create undreamed of products for export and internal
> consumption, how it would change this century as rail once changed a
> century.

   There's a whole herd of elephants in the room, in fact.  But doing anything on this scale requires serious money and some guarantees that the resulting infrastructure will be actually used.  We certainly need "vision" on a very wide scope, but not arm-waving.

   Let's say the proposal is to replace all existing copper subscriber connections with fibre of some sort.  All sorts of potential uses might be identified, but the main use would probably be TV (*).  That's fine, but vision then requires us to ask why we don't phase out broadcast TV entirely instead of spending enormous amounts phasing in digital TV and requiring everyone in the country to buy a digital TV set or adapter?  I suspect these questions are not asked because they in turn raise ugly issues of access-control, copyright, monoply content provision, compensation, and so on.

   Our national propensity to avoid difficult issues is costing us big money.

(*)  I'm reminded of PBS' proposal (?) in the early 80s that Australia launch a national satellite network.  There was much carry-on about how this would benefit remote areas, and organisations such as the Isolated Childrens Parents Association and the Flying Doctor Service lobbied hard to make it happen.  But it never did, and the simple reason was that remote education etc., though certainly useful, was a red herring used to sell the idea; the real purpose was networked TV.

Cheers,
David