|
The federal Labor government has committed, without any
detailed cost-benefit analysis, $43 billion of mostly taxpayers' money, to
build the National Broadband Network (NBN), a high-speed broadband network based
on providing fibre optic cable to 93% of Australian homes over an eight year
period.
The world's richest man, Mexican telecommunications
tycoon Carlos Slim has slammed the government's planned NBN, claiming it is too
expensive.
"It's too much money," Mr Slim said at a
Sydney conference last week. "It's not necessary to invest so much money
because technology is changing all the time."
"Fibre is not enough - you need to have a good
network of wireless, a good wi-fi network," he said. "You need to have
a multi-platform of everything: mobile, landline, fibre, cable and copper."
The most expensive infrastructure project in
Australia's history could turn out to be a massive waste of taxpayers' money by
being superseded even before it is completed, as a revolutionary new wireless
broadband system is about to hit the US market.
In November 2008, the US government decided to
reallocate the "white space" of unallocated frequencies in the
television channels range that would no longer be needed when the last of that
country's analogue television transmitters switched to digital broadcasting in
June 2009.
In mid-September 2010, after years of testing, the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington DC gave the go-ahead for
other users to take up these frequencies in the 54 megahertz to 806 megahertz
band.
Frequencies in the 700 to 800 megahertz band were
auctioned off to mobile phone companies for $20 billion, but importantly, the
FCC made the white space below 700 megahertz free to wireless internet service
providers.
The reason these channels are so valuable - and why they
were chosen for TV transmission in the first place - is because their signals
travel for kilometres, can carry huge amounts of information, are unaffected by
weather and can penetrate buildings.
The frequencies below 700 megahertz are being provided
free of charge to internet service providers because the US government hopes to
trigger a wireless internet revolution, based on moving large volumes of data
further, faster and cheaper.
While the Gillard government boasts that its NBN will
move data at 100 megabits per second, the new white space devices are expected
to be able to zip data along at 400 to 800 megabits per second over ranges of
tens of kilometres, making the NBN look like a laggard.
Australia will turn off the last of its analogue TV
transmitters by the end of 2013.
In the meantime, Prime Minister Gillard and
Communications Minister Conroy should go back to the drawing board and come up
with a plan to embrace the new technology before huge amounts of taxpayers' money
are wasted on a potentially obsolescent system.
The federal government should concentrate on just
providing a cable backbone between major population centres while closely
monitoring the the roll-out of white space technology in the US and conducting
its own tests.
If the new technology proves to be a winner, the
government would be limited to providing fibre to a number of transmitting towers in
each city. It may be able to piggy-back the antennae to existing mobile phone
towers. The rest could be left to the private sector.
The result would be a world-class broadband system,
provided sooner than the NBN and at a fraction of the cost to the taxpayers.
Gillard and Conroy would do well to heed Mr Slim's
words.
|
