[LINK] Broadband for a Broad Land

[Richard Chirgwin]

On 23/12/10 9:51 AM, Tom Worthington wrote:
> A parliamentary inquiry into the NBN has invited submissions by 28
> February:<http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/ic/NBN/>.
>
> What worries me is that NBN Co. is assuming: "build it and they
> will come". The government is spending billions of dollars building a
> system, in the hope that it will help with services, health, education,
> environment, economic growth, employment, business efficiency, research
> and development.
>
> In my view the provision of the NBN is not sufficient to ensure
> broadband will benefit the community and may well cause harm. The NBN
> will allow the move of regional services jobs in government, finance,
> education and health to Australian cities and many of these Australian
> jobs overseas. The NBN may harm the environment by increasing greenhouse
> gas emissions from the energy it uses, by polluting groundwater from the
> equipment it makes obsolete and from discarded backup batteries.
Tom,

I haven't seen any demonstration that fibre uses more energy than ADSL 
over copper; and it indisputably uses far, far less electricity than 
wireless on a per-Mbps, per-user basis.

As to polluting groundwater: if not Telstra, then someone will 
definitely recover the copper network, because copper is valuable. I 
would agree that a plan should be put into place for recycling the 
exchange equipment.

That leaves batteries. The greatest risk is from putting battery 
management and disposal in the hands of consumers. Right now, the backup 
batteries (of which there are vast numbers, but they're low-visibility 
to us because they're all in Telstra exchanges) are managed by carriers, 
who I presume handle them responsibly. If the batteries are NBN-provided 
and therefore managed, their environmental impact should be similar in 
order to the environmental impact of today's backup batteries; an expert 
could discuss the relative environmental merits of very large lead-acid 
battery banks vs. gel-based batteries.

Richard C
> I suggest submissions from ACS, ISOC-AU and similar bodies, proposing
> government programs and investment to ensure the NBN provides benefits.
> This could be along the lines of "Vision for a Networked Nation" which
> Roger Clarke wrote for ACS (with my assistance). This was presented to
> several parliamentary inquiries in the mid 1990s:
> <http://www.tomw.net.au/nt/vision.html>.
>
> Australian governments drew on the rhetoric and the specific proposals
> of this and similar submissions from the ICT community in formulating
> programs (such as "Networking the Nation") to help the community and
> industry use what became known as the Internet.
>
> Examples of existing relatively low cost federal/state programs which
> could be boosted to make the NBN more effective for education are EdNa
> and the Australian Flexible Learning Framework. These teach teachers how
> to create and use online educational resources. A modest few hundred
> million dollars invested in e-learning could result in billions of
> dollars in education exports and prevent the loss of Australia's current
> education industry to overseas imports.
>
> More on this at:
> <http://blog.tomw.net.au/2010/12/parliamentary-inquiry-into-role-and.html>.
>
>