[LINK] NBN, education and health

[Kim Holburn]

You know I don't agree with most of what you wrote.  We've been over all this many times.  I find it amazing that the moment there's an apparent hiccup with the NBN all the naysayers start naying. 

On 2011/Apr/05, at 8:48 PM, Robin Whittle wrote:

> There are several tragic ironies regarding education and the NBN.
> 
> One of the big reasons the government gives for spending tens of
> billions of dollars on the NBN is to improve education for people in
> general, especially outside the major population centres.
> 
> Yet the plan was devised by people who were uneducated in IT and
> infrastructure planning matters - the prime minister and the minister
> for (censored) communications.

This is either not true or not relevant.  Most people I know who understand ICT think this is a very good idea and well thought out.

Over the years our government has made some incredibly bad ICT decisions.  One that springs to mind is selling Telstra - selling a government monopoly that made billions for the government while leaving its effective monopoly in place.  For whatever reason the NBN is not one of these bad decisions.

> Now a bunch of bright, hard working, people at NBNCo now have the job of
> achieving the outcome, according to the timetable, and within the $43B
> cost

Yes?  That's what companies do.

> - all of which were decided largely or entirely by the two
> insufficiently qualified people who devised the project.
> 
> NBNCo try to get quotes from a bunch of companies on the most difficult
> aspect of the project, running fibre along streets and into individual
> homes - and connecting the requisite equipment.  I am not sure how they
> can they specify the difficulties of doing this.  So how could there be
> a contract, unless the tenderers are supposed to take enormous risk?

Australia has people and companies who can do stuff and reasonably efficiently.  I'm sure they can manage.  

> The quotes come back - the work of people who are presumably very well
> educated in these matters - and they are all too high for the spec,
> timetable and costs which have already been determined.
> 
> Part of the problem is that these potential installation contracting
> companies don't have - and won't be able to get - sufficient numbers of
> suitably educated people to do the work.
> 
> If the NBN existed today, it wouldn't help much in providing the sort of
> education required for doing a number of useful things, such as laying
> cable, installing and testing equipment etc.

There are already people laying cable along streets, so it's possible to do and there are people with training and experience doing it right now.  

This is kind of a bleak view of Australian society: that we can't even organise the laying a bunch of cable.  If it's true we should just give up now.  Maybe we should get a bunch of Chinese companies to do it.  They have laid fibre to most of rural China (probably a decade ago) and that's a way bigger job than we have.  China is one of the most ruralised societies in the world.

> It is arguably a result of insufficient education that:
> 
>  1 - The whole NBN proposal was conceived, with its goals and costs
>      already decided - never mind alternative approaches to using
>      the money for health and education - and then taken seriously
>      within the government.

There are lots of things the government could do with its $26B share of the money.  We could equip and send more people to invade other countries and, you know, die and stuff.  We could fix our rail system so it worked.  Governments of all persuasions have been cutting funding for education and health.  Suddenly you want to change this?
 
>  2 - That anyone outside government took it seriously.  Even quite
>      well planned IT projects are highly prone to going over-time and
>      over budget and/or being obsolete or in some other way
>      inappropriate by the time they are completed.  Yet this is a
>      project far bigger than any other IT project, with far less in
>      the way of suitably informed planning.

I'm not sure I agree with any of that.  Except the part about projects, but IT doesn't have a patent on projects going wrong.  Look at the Sydney Opera house as a case in point.  This project is not much bigger than the copper telephone system in its day.

>  3 - That there is not a greater pool of people with general skills
>      of a suitable kind who could be brought up to speed in something
>      like cable-laying and telco installation.

I think there is just such a pool of people who have been laying cable right up to now.  How did all the cable get laid in the great Telstra-Optus cable fiasco a few decades ago?  My suburb was rewired about 10 years ago in a couple of weeks by two different groups.  It's not a big deal really.

> I think some of the NBN money would be better spent on boosting pay
> rates of teachers - from kindergarten teachers to university lecturers -
> and ensuring that the best people for these jobs want to do this work
> and are well supported with training, professional development and good
> facilities.  The whole public education system needs to be a matter of
> national pride - and the teachers should be the sort of people who are
> widely respected.  Then we won't have so much of this pernicious
> splitting of student populations into private schools, leaving the
> public schools to handle only those whose parent's don't have higher
> standards and the money to send them elsewhere.  I understand this is
> the typical situation in the USA.

I can't disagree with the principle of funding education as an investment in society.  One of the best things the Labour government did in the past couple of years was fund a building project for schools.  My daughter's primary school got an excellent new library out of that.  An extremely successful use of funding for education.

> I think very little of what is important in education - particularly
> kindergarten, primary school, secondary school and most of TAFE - can be
> conducted through electronic channels and/or be achieved without really
> good teachers.

Don't entirely disagree with this but I would say that electronic channels of communication only open new means of people communicating with each other.  There's nothing magical in the infrastructure itself.

> Likewise, I think the contribution the NBN will make to health is
> minimal compared to whatever benefits are already achievable with a mix
> of DSL and 3G wireless.  These already exist where the great majority of
> Australians live.  

And the mobile wireless is not going to go away, it will probably get better as a result of the NBN.  DSL can die AFAIC, the sooner the better.

> Maybe putting in low-cost high-speed broadband will
> encourage nurses and doctors to live outside major cities, and so
> improve health outcomes in this manner.  

Yes.

> Still, I think the money would
> be better spent directly on health outside the major population centres
> - facilities, salaries, training and professional development and
> whatever is needed to encourage sufficient numbers or doctors and nurses
> to live and work outside the big cities.

However the government spends our money, there will always be people who disagree with their choices.

> If there was better education and healthcare outside the major cities,
> more people would choose to live there and there would be a stronger
> demand for broadband communications - which existing providers would be
> able to meet via DSL, fibre or 3G / WiMax radio links.

Yeah if there were no roads, the demand would just magically create them?  The only reason we have DSL at all is because our government built the infrastructure in a giant project much like the NBN.  Copper has now outlived its usefulness.  Current DSL offerings are rubbish compared with what is possible and being done around the world.  Have you used WiMax?  I have.  Give me a decent fibre connection any day.  On top of that there are people in the country still without a phone.  

There's a reason why the government created the Universal Service Obligation after it sold Telstra.  It knew that once Telstra was a private company it would have walked away from country people without the government sitting on it and twisting its arm.  

> So directly funding health and education would arguably improve
> broadband in the bush, without the government needing to support any
> such IT project, or worry about exactly which technologies would be
> used.  Also, without the need to suddenly create or import a massive
> workforce of cable layers and the like for a once-off project.

So ... why hasn't it happened so far?  Because it won't happen without government support.  Not in a country the size of ours.  

> That said, no matter what governments and corporations do, living far
> from major population centres will never provide lots of the benefits of
> living near them.  People make a choice about where to live, and I don't
> think it is the role of most taxpayers to spend excessive sums of money
> to bring every benefit to them, no matter where they live.

Aren't we a society?  People living in the bush bring us city dwellers lots of benefits, like food for one.  Why should they have to live in the dark ages?  

> Even with the best health and education outcomes for people living
> outside major cities, the major cities will continue to grow because
> many things are less expensive (good food,

Other countries have good food in the country, better than the cities.  That's a peculiarly Australian problem created by our food distribution system.

> short commute distances to jobs)

Short commute distances?  I hardly know where to start with that one, it's just silly.  You clearly have never lived in Sydney's western suburbs.   Many people in the country live right near where they work - like on their farm for instance.  It's the cities where you have to commute in a contested space and time.

> and because a greater variety of activities, jobs etc. are
> available.  To the extent these attractions exist, we see the price of
> real-estate in cities going up - until these costs roughly balance out
> the benefits according to how many people weigh them up.

Australia is one of the most urbanised societies in the world, especially when you consider the size of our country and the low population density of rural Australia.  This is one way we can encourage people back to the land and keep the people on the land feeling part of our society.

You'd think from what you just said that there were no benefit for people living in the country.  For them or for us.  I don't think that's true at all.

-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
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