[LINK] The PLAN, and broadband speeds?

[Janet Hawtin]

On 6/20/07, David Lochrin <dlochrin at d2.net.au> wrote:
> On Wednesday 20 June 2007 12:54, Karl Auer wrote:
> > There is an elephant in the room with this whole "broadband" thing.
> > [...]

> > 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.

We are the elephant(s)?.
We do not seem to plan for our own infrastructure and governance and
appear to be led (by
the trunk) from vendor to vendor without any anchoring or scoping based around
building/maintaining/defining a nation. I am not sure our political
representatives 'believe in' government or infrastructure or public
good, and so are idealogically at odds with the responsibility for
representing those interests on the nation's behalf.
Thats what it looks like from a lay person's perspective.

Which are the core centres/documents/proposals/voices/and models for
AU infrastructure which start with our national interest, use
technologies which will be useful long term, which will be able to
grow without lockin to a vendor, which are public owned, which AU
companies can use open standards, open code, open hardware to
innovate/participate in.
Broadband, power, rail/transport, water, education, health, voting technologies.
I think there is a hole in our national interest.