Grahame Lynch has raised some valid questions in relation to who is influencing the government and, as a result, telecommunications policy. Our government appears determined to invest up to $43 billion in a brand new telecoms utility that will deploy FTTH broadband infrastructure to homes across Australia. This ‘nation building’ investment has been justified on the basis of the ‘self-evident’ economic benefits that a FTTH network will bring to the Australian economy. It is apparently self-evident that this investment is so worthwhile that the price tag itself is almost irrelevant, writes Jason Ashton of BigAir.

In fact, if the government had instead announced the investment would cost almost twice as much (say $80 billion) it is entirely reasonable to expect the same conclusions (to proceed with haste) would result.

Given the amount of money, and the potential impact on both our economy and our industry, the question needs to be asked—who is helping the government properly assess the costs and benefits to all stakeholders of this shiny new FTTH network and what are their qualifications to do so? We are told that that the government was advised by the NBN expert panel that none of the bids for the $4.7 billion FTTN network represented value for money leading to the tender being abandoned.

Further we are told the government was advised by the same expert panel that FTTH is a much better solution (despite the dramatically greater investment required).

I have no doubt that the members of the expert panel performed an admiral job given the terms of reference of the tender, their qualifications and their network building experience. My concern is that there was no representation on the expert panel from the people in our industry that have actually built competitive broadband infrastructure networks. Why were none of the communications entrepreneurs in our industry invited to participate in the panel or at the very least provide some real world experiences with respect to the myriad of last mile technology choices that are available today and why trying to pick a technology winner is ultimately destined to fail?

REAL: The real world input that successful network builders like Bevan Slattery of Pipe or Simon Hackett of Internode could provide to this critical process was lost in preference to the academic utopia of how wonderful it would be to have access to cheap fiber right across the country (with the economic return on this investment secondary to the perceived and as yet to be understood benefits). By engaging with the people that actually build competitive broadband networks the government might then have had access to real world information on the range of 100Mbps—1000Mbps data services that are already available to many businesses today from multiple network owners across many capital cities with regional deployment only held back by well documented backhaul constraints.

In fact even much maligned “wireless” technology (delivered by BigAir amongst others) is capable of delivering broadband data at speeds up to 1000Mbps today. It is clear that this infrastructure based competition along with the deployment of competitive DSLAMs in Telstra exchanges is delivering real innovation, increasingly faster speeds, lower prices and sustainable long term benefits to the economy as a whole. I would argue that trying to replace all this with a national FTTH network will not further stimulate innovation and will in fact lead to a lessening of infrastructure based competition.

It would appear that the government has understandably been influenced by commentators and analysts that enjoy talking up their ‘vision’ for the new digital economy which typically includes various claims around e-health, e-government, and smart grid benefits, etc. And we are led to believe that these benefits will start to miraculously appear once we increase the typical household line speeds from 6–12Mbps to 100Mbps. I would argue that valuable input is needed now from the people that have already done something that has materially contributed to our existing broadband infrastructure (and have therefore helped actually create our existing digital economy).

There needs to be public input to this new NBN policy from the people that have actually done the hard yards rolling out real alternative infrastructure (not just those happy to continue wholesaling Telstra or future NBNCo products as a margin play) and who as a direct result helped people access genuinely faster broadband services as well as creating jobs and helping to grow our digital economy over the last 10 years. 

Jason Ashton, CEO BigAir