Turning off the television

Revisiting Mackay Online

The national broadband network (NBN) is the largest public infrastructure project undertaken in Australia, and NBN Co is the government-owned company responsible for building the network. By using operations research, NBN Co expects to avoid more than $AUD1.7 billion in unnecessary construction and design costs on this $AUD36 billion project. At the beginning of this 10-year project, NBN Co divided the country into more than 3,000 fiber-serving-area modules (FSAMs), each covering approximately 2,500 premises, and will design and construct one FSAM each day. NBN Co contracted with Biarri Networks, an Australian commercial mathematics company, to optimize the design task. To accomplish this, Biarri created a fiber-optic network design (FOND) software product based on a network-flow mixed-integer programming engine. This engine minimizes the cost of materials and labor for each FSAM, subject to a variety of constraints, and provides a solution in less than five minutes. To date, more than 650 FSAM designs have been completed using FOND. This has saved NBN Co an estimated $AUD325 million in avoided construction cost, and the planning time per FSAM has decreased from 145 to 16 days.

The National Broadband Network (NBN) has the potential to transform economic and social relations. But realising that potential requires universal take-up and significant utilisation of the NBN. This paper examines how NBN wholesale pricing can help to do this. It introduces a mark-up concept to build a bridge between wholesale and retail prices, provides a yard-stick for how we might define affordable retail pricing and suggests how an entry level wholesale price can be specified to deliver that and enable low income customers to access the NBN.

This study reviews the economic benefits analysis conducted in 2014 for the National Broadband Network (NBN), one of Australia's largest ever public infrastructure projects. The review identifies that the NBN's benefits were overstated due to error by an estimated $17–20 billion in 2014 present value terms, an amount sufficient to eliminate the NBN's forecast net economic benefits. To provide an updated view on the benefits of high-speed broadband in 2022, a stated choice experiment is conducted, finding that the WTP has grown since 2014 at an annual real rate of 8.8 percent for download speeds and 11.5 percent for upload speeds. Even at these growth rates, however, the benefits of the NBN remain materially lower than forecast in 2014. Further, the analysis finds high heterogeneity in the household WTP, with smaller and lower-income households reluctant to pay a premium for speeds much faster than 50 Mbps, indicating that the adoption of the fastest available broadband speeds is likely to remain low. The study highlights the potential value of cost-benefit analyses, but also the risks, particularly where they are relied on to justify enduring extensions of government ownership and control. The paper concludes by identifying learnings for policymakers and cost-benefit analysis practitioners seeking to assess and optimize the economic value of public infrastructure investments.

In April 2009, the Australian Government announced plans to roll-out the National Broadband Network (NBN) Company Open Access Network in Australia. Australia’s NBN will bring high speed internet access to areas and people that otherwise would have been without. Predicting consequences (both positive and negative) arising from the NBN, as well as risks and opportunities that it will generate differentially between places, groups and sectors, is inherently uncertain. With little reliable data available on social impacts of NBN-style access at the household and community level, policy-making and regulation risks responding to optimistic speculation and commercially motivated spin rather than carefully weighed evidence. The research reported in this paper aimed to address this gap with a preliminary assessment of the social impacts of the NBN-like broadband roll-out at one New South Wales test site in southwest Sydney. The paper discusses the research methods and findings and frames recommendations for further research to address both limitations that arose in the research reported here, and broader gaps in understanding the social impacts of new forms of broadband access and associated applications. Due to the small sample size, this preliminary report provides details and findings from a scoping research perspective that aims to inform future research in this area.

While most critiques of the Coalition Government?s National Broadband Network (NBN) policy have focussed on the wisdom of its Fibre to the Node technology choice, a more fundamental weakness in its NBN election policy promises to make it a financial debacle if not corrected. This paper spells out the many negative consequences of the Government's policy to remove the NBN Co's current monopoly in providing fixed broadband access infrastructure: to the federal budget, to the competition framework in telecommunications, to a forced premature sale of NBN Co, and to the affordable rollout of high-speed broadband access across the nation. The Minister of Communications is urged to correct this policy element rapidly, in the national interest.

This paper sets out to clarify the confusion surrounding what Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is by classifying three types of IPTV Computer Based IPTV, Partial IPTV and Full IPTV. By analysing the benefits and pitfalls of each classification a picture emerges surrounding the rich potential to develop additional services for Full IPTV when delivered over a fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network. Australia's commitment to invest in a FTTP National Broadband Network (NBN) offers the prospect of Australia becoming leading innovator in this field. Copyright 2010 Jeremy Weinstein. No part of this article may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

IR14 panel discussion on conceptualizing non-users of the internet and mapping digital (dis)engagement, including this paper which explores the contexts and motivations that underpin the uptake of Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN). The findings are drawn from a mixed-methods research study of households using surveys and interviews conducted in 2011 and 2012 in an early release site of the NBN rollout. Whilst use and non-use have traditionally been treated as questions of digital access, inequality and exclusion, there is evidence for emerging forms of non-use characterized by more critical and discriminating approaches. We contribute to this evidence, but our findings suggest that use and non-use of high speed broadband do not occur in isolation or as an expression of individual choice, but as part of increasingly dense household media ecologies of digital infrastructures, devices, services and knowledge.

An access regime that does not care whether an access provider is vertically integrated or structurally separated is blind to a significant factor in successfully achieving open access - Ross Kelso, TJA Vol 58 No. 1.

E-health is the health care buzzword of the moment, with a person-controlled electronic health record funded in the 2010 federal Budget and legislation to introduce health identifiers recently passed by Parliament. E-health can ease the patient journey, improve quality of care and reduce costs. Australia's health care system lags behind all other sectors of our economy in the use of computerised systems. While general practice and community pharmacy are highly computerised, the hospital sector is not. Adopting e-health is likely to result in higher quality practice, but general practice and hospitals need a mechanism for securely sharing patient data. Uncoordinated implementation of differing, incompatible systems within and between hospitals compounds a dire lack of national coordination of effort. Multiple funding streams and jurisdictions and the lack of an implementation strategy have slowed e-health development. Government programs underestimate the costs of change management and the need for training and technology. Confusion reigns about responsibilities, but governments must ensure connectivity between health care providers and recognise that the benefits will accrue into the future. The National E-Health Transition Authority has developed national open-access standards, and its foundation projects and the National Broadband Network are now coming into place. To ensure the clinical relevance, utility, safety and acceptability of e-health systems, health professionals urgently need technical capacity and expert guidance.

On 22 October 2019, TelSoc held its second NBN Futures Forum in Melbourne on the theme of realising the user potential of Australia’s National Broadband Network. Four speakers discussed various aspects of usage, including digital inclusion, access and affordability, broadband-enabled services, and service pricing. While the NBN has increased access to broadband, affordability remains an issue and the evidence suggests that gaps in digital inclusion are not being closed. The New Zealand experience suggests that demand for high-speed broadband will continue to grow if wholesale and retail prices are appropriately set. The cost of the NBN rollout remains a challenge for wholesale prices. Various improvements in affordability, including direct subsidies for low-income households, were canvassed.

The Australian telecommunications industry has been slow to call for or to adopt new practices and the National Broadband Network has exacerbated the problem of technology adoption lag. There are two key issues facing telecommunication consumers today. The cost of optical networking has significantly reduced over the past five years so there is no justification for the network congestion that occurs on Australian telecommunication networks. To remedy this situation the introduction of performance monitoring is fully supported. It is time for the telecommunications industry to adopt new broadband business models that are based on the provision of unlimited data and a maximum of 90 to 95 per cent utilisation on optical network links.

ABSTRACTA nascent literature has examined recent controversial policy initiatives by the Australian Government using insights from the literature on public policy evaluation. Scholars have considered inter alia the Mineral Resources Rent Tax, the Home Insulation Program, the Green Loans Program, the Building the Education Revolution and the macroeconomic stimulus package after the global financial crisis. The present paper adds to this literature by considering the National Broadband Network (NBN). The costs of implementing the NBN are examined and the paper attempts to draw some broader public policy ‘lessons‘ to inform future public policy making both in Australia and elsewhere.

Infrastructure developments under the National Broadband Network and the prominence of Web 2.0 technologies and other broadband-enabled applications and services have prompted the Australian Federal Government to address Internet use for two-way communication with citizens. Online civic engagement is encouraged and endorsed through recent policies; however, there is a significant gap in transforming visions of engagement into forms of action. Federal initiatives emphasise the role of customers over citizens and implicitly equate improved service delivery with increased online engagement.This article explores the e-government goal of the National Digital Economy Strategy, which aims to have four out of five Australians engaging with governments online by 2020 and identifies that local and state governments will drive greater digital engagement. Improved infrastructure will not routinely transfer into increased online engagement, and local governments in particular will require additional guidance and support when advancing e-government practices. This article suggests that a cohesive e-government policy approach that coordinates knowledge and action through the various tiers of Australian government would facilitate the development of citizen-centric opportunities for e-government engagement.

Hybrid system inclusive of renewable energy may be a key component for the solution of global warming, poor air quality, economic dependence, reducing-dwindling reserves of fossil fuels and also carbon tax in Australia. Firstly, this paper describes the experimental setup of wind/solar 4 kW micro generation system, examines the energy produced and various readings of monthly, weekly, daily and partially curves are recorded at regular intervals. The work shows notably the benefit of using wind/solar 4 kW micro generation system to reduce CO2 emissions by implementing in every independent home in Australia. Secondly, this paper focuses on the experiment conducted by 1.2 kW PEM fuel cell system designed for communications backup power applications under laboratory conditions at the Power Systems Research Laboratory in Victoria University. The work shows notably the benefit of using H2 and fuel cell system for the recent layout of National Broadband Network (NBN) in Australia proposed by the federal government ($43 billion project).