[LINK] Indonesia Overtaking Australia with Wireless Internet

[grove at zeta.org.au]

On Fri, 3 Jun 2011, Tom Worthington wrote:

> Greetings from the famous room N101 at the at the Australian National
> University, where Dr Idris Sulaiman is speaking on "ICT-enablement in
> Environmental Social Movements in Indonesia":
> <http://cecs.anu.edu.au/seminars/more/SID/2879>.


> Dr Sulaiman describes Indonesia as a 'near-networked' nation. He argues
> that argues that ICT-enablement is now having a significant effect and
> that such developing nations with smart phones are bypassing development
> steps of western nations. The use of smart phones in Jakarta now exceeds
> that of Sydney. With more applications becoming available for smart
> phones and tablet computers, this may see developing nations in a better
> position to exploit the technology and take the lead globally in the
> information economy.
>
> This has significant implications for Australia, which has invested $43B
> in a nationalised fibre optic National Broadband Network. It may be that
> Indoenisa's free market wireless approach turns out to have been the
> better option. If most consumers and small businesses access the
> Internet via a hand held wireless device, then the rationale for the NBN
> evaporates. However, as Dr Sulaiman  pointed out the wireless has
> capacity limitations and in Indonesia (and Australia to a lesser extent)
>  latency and daily peak period cause problems. But these are likely to
> be acceptable for casual personal use but not for business.

I am hoping this conference won't be used to once again bang on about the 
NBN and the wisdom in not doing it.   It's not $43Bn anymore, either 
but apparently will be a bit less.   I wonder if wireless is more 
suitable for Indonesia given the geology of the area, its concentrated
(and dispersed) population centres and that wireless is a lot more easy 
to spy on in an ad-hoc method than other technologies?   I actually do not 
consider Indonesia to be a good comparison to Australia for networked 
technologies as there are many cultural and geographical differences 
between the two....


rachel

-- 
Rachel Polanskis                 Kingswood, Greater Western Sydney, Australia
grove at zeta.org.au                http://www.zeta.org.au/~grove/grove.html
    "The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum." - Finagle's Law