[LINK] Broadband for a Broad Land

[Tom Worthington]

I wrote:
> A parliamentary inquiry into the NBN has invited submissions ...

I started writing a submission for the NBN Inquiry: 
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2010/12/broadband-for-broad-land.html>.

So far I have grouped the eight areas the Inquiry is looking at into 
four broad categories:

a. Social impacts:
  1. achieving health outcomes;
  2. improving the educational resources and training...
  3. facilitating community and social benefits;

b. Regional and environmental impacts:
  1. the management of Australia's built and natural resources ...
  2. impacting regional economic growth and employment opportunities;

c. Business impacts:
  1. impacting business efficiencies and revenues ...
  2. interaction with research and development ...

d. Requirements:
  1. the optimal capacity and technological requirements ...

Then I looked at what the NBN was and how it may change education, 
business and regional development.

The NBN may help regional areas by providing better Internet access, or 
disadvantage them by disproportionately increasing access in city areas. 
My conclusions was that the increase in speed for regional areas to 12 
mbps was more significant than the inrease in urban areas to 100 mbps, 
particuarly as many applications will be designed for mobile use at less 
than 12 mbps.

In the case of education there will be investments needed to take 
advantage of broadband. Teachers need to be retrained, courses 
restructured and schools remodelled to take advantage of new online 
education paradigms. The cost of this investment will make the $43B for 
the NBN look tiny in comparison.

The cost and complexity of remodelling Australian schools for broadband 
will make the $14.2b Primary Schools for the 21st Century component of 
the Australian Government's "Building the Education Revolution" program, 
look cheap and simple. So far it has been assumed that this involves 
installing some cabling. But will require completely remodelling the 
schools into "learning commons". One part of this which will not be so 
difficult is curricular, where the  will make the work on the National 
Curriculum can be extended.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra