[LINK] Business fetishism (was Re: LINK] Four Corners NBN)

[Richard Chirgwin]

[snip]
> The business just needs one fibre link, not one to every home in the
> bush. Similarly, for educational applications, the schools need the links.
>
> Businesses and teachers need to understand this is not all one way
> traffic: businesses in the city (and around the world) will be able to
> offer services and compete for jobs in the bush. In the case of
> education, the local staff may become essentially child minders and
> equipment maintainers, while the teaching is located remotely, in the
> city or another country.
Tom & others,

In my opinion, we need to ditch "business fetishism" from the NBN debate.

"Broadband is for business" is a characteristic of the less-developed 
nation. In any country in which there are (for example) more business 
broadband customers than consumer customers, the other characteristics 
of that country will be (a) poor infrastructure, and (b) restricted 
growth in telecomms and services.

In highly-developed broadband markets, consumers outnumber businesses - 
usually by about 10:1 - both in subscribers and revenue. The real 
breakthroughs, in market sustainability, scale, application diversity 
etc, come from pervasive networks that connect everybody.

The statement that "this is good for business, but consumers don't need 
it" is third-world thinking.

I can't predict what the "killer app" might be, any more than an 
alderman or mayor of the 1920s would predict that electricity would 
power DVD players. I can, however, believe that those who say "it won't 
be in the consumer market", are wrong. (Likewise, those who dismiss the 
NBN as "high speed entertainment" are missing the point: entertainment 
might look frivolous if you look at the content, but it's also serious 
money that is most valuable when it's most broadly available.)

Finally, regarding apps of the future. E-learning and tele-health are 
already passe in terms of the NBN debate. We focus on them because 
they're things we're already familiar with - we can visualise what they 
do. But nearly all of the "great killer Internet applications" are not 
top-down, but bottom-up. Here's a short list of applications I nominate 
as "user led" that changed the world and the network:

SMTP
VoIP (invented by John Walker because he wanted on-network calls from 
Europe to the US)
HTML (Tim Berners-Lee)
Skype
Google
BitTorrent

I realise that I'm ignoring counter-examples, but I would expect that 
any competent study would find successful, pervasive user-led 
innovations outnumber business-led innovations on the Internet.

RC
>> But it was a reasonably good relatively unbiased coverage of the issues.
> Just to make it clear, I am not anti-NBN. But I suspect we need more
> wireless in the mix. Also the $42B is only a small fraction of the
> investment which will be required to take advantage for the network.
> That investment will be paid for by physical services being replaced
> with online ones. Just as ATMs allowed bank branches to be closed in
> rural areas, tele-health and e-learning will allow doctors and teachers
> to be replaced with online equivalents. We need to make sure these
> changes to business, government and social structures are in the public
> interest.
>
>