[LINK] NBN widening digital divide in bush

[Tom Worthington]

Nikki Tugwell, of ABC News Online's Investigative Unit reports that the 
NBN will widen the disparity between city and country Internet users 
("NBN disparity threatens to widen the gap", July 12, 2011 14:15:00):

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-07-12/nbn-disparity-threatens-to-widen-the-gap/2791840

It is reported that those in remote areas, beyond the reach of fiber 
optic cable and terrestrial wireless, will receive satellite broadband. 
This will be limited to i Mbps upload speed.

Associate Professor Ellie Rennie, Swinburne University's Institute for 
Social Research, will be reporting on the "Home Internet Usage for 
Remote Indigenous Communities", 20 July. She has indicated one megabit 
per second will not be sufficient for real-time video streaming, thus 
limiting its use for electronic health, education and training:

http://www.sisr.net/Flagships/CAC/Projects/Home_Inter.html

Professor Rennie is reported to have claimed that video conferencing 
won't be possible via the NBN in remote areas, making e-health and 
off-site lectures impossible. This is an exaggeration, as video 
conferencing is possible at speeds slower than 1 Mbps, it is not needed 
symmetrically for many applications and many e-health and e-learning 
applications do not need video conferencing.

Also it will be the latency of the satellite link which will cause 
difficulties with many applications, not the bandwidth of the link. It 
is not that enough data can't be sent through the link, but there is too 
long a delay in transmitting the data.

This is not to say that the disparity of urban and remote NBN speeds 
will not cause problems, but that there are ways to address this. The 
first and most obvious solution is to design applications for different 
speeds: this will allow the service to be provided, on low and high 
speed links. Another way is to provide alternatives to real time video. 
An example is where high resolution videos can be prerecorded, with the 
real time interactive component done at lower resolution (I have 
successfully used video for education at 28.8 kbps).

One way to lessen the delay problems is with use of non-verbal/visual 
protocols. At a face to face event, a participant would indicate they 
wist to talk by putting up their hand or simply starting to speak. This 
may be difficult on-line and so systems have a button to click for the 
participant to raise their virtual hand to signal to the moderator. As 
well as getting around problems with the video/audio quality, this can 
allow for a very fast and efficient way to get feedback, not possible 
with traditional communications.

While remote users will still get lower speed NBN service, they will not 
necessarily receive inferior health and educational services as a 
result. By getting more direct access, they will have a better service 
in many ways, than those from traditional face to face services in the city.


-- 
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