[LINK] Broadband for a Broad Land

[Frank O'Connor]

At 10:59 AM +1100 28/12/10, Tom Worthington wrote:
>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.

Mmm ... many Internet apps are Web based, and don't benefit from the 
increase in bandwidth beyond the initial 12 Mbs. HTTP is a stateless 
protocol, text based (with markup items) and embedded video standards 
(and even Flash!) presuppose bandwdth less than 12Mbs.

The problem on the Web is latency ... and depending how the NBN 
implements this the Web may or may not be a better experience.

>
>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.

I'd argue that education needs a new application/standard to 
supplement the Web. Something built from the ground up to be 
interactive with the student, responsive to their inputs and needs, 
and malleable enough and easy enough to use for the teacher to add 
content and make the necessary tweaks and changes to meet their 
students' needs.

>
>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.
>

If the changes happen at the application level the amount of capital 
and other investment costs by schools should be minimal. Install the 
application and its framework on their PC's, laptops, tablets, phones 
or whatever, the server software and content on the servers and given 
the common connection   standards and framework of the NBN connection 
and the like shouldn't be a problem. I mean for a school you could 
install 802.11N WiFi hubs, routers which are connected to the NBN at 
geographically distributed access points in the school, enable 
roaming, and students would have a better than 100Mbs connection to 
the routers connected to the NBN. The N hubs/routers cost little 
nowadays (Between $100 and $199 when sold by retail), can handle up 
to 128 clients at any given time each, and generally speaking are 3-4 
times faster than the 100 Mbs NBN connection anyway.

It's simply a matter of doing it smarter - the NBN does not mean you 
have to use wires for every access point.

Just my 2 cents worth ...

					Regards,