The land of kangaroos, gum trees, sheep and Shane Warne may soon be known for something else altogether more hi-tech: the world’s best and most ubiquitous broadband.
Australia’s Labour Party has been at the forefront of an aggressive, state-led push to take advanced broadband infrastructure to just about every corner of the nation. Broadband has become dinner-table conversation as Labour and the opposition coalition argue not about whether to deliver next-generation Internet services to citizens (there’s general agreement on that) but how best to do it.
The politicians have recognised that to compete in the modern globalised information economy the country needs to deliver a network that ensures it is hyperconnected — and at the sort of speeds South Africans and many other nations would salivate over.
Almost alone in the world, the Australian government bought (effectively nationalised) the “last-mile” network of the fixed-line incumbent Telstra and is investing the equivalent of many medium-income countries’ GDPs in fibre-based telecoms infrastructure. The company created to lead the project, NBN Co, plans to build 200 000 km of fibre-optic infrastructure and at the peak will be taking the network into 6 000 homes a day.
NBN Co will eventually connect 93% of Australian homes to fibre, delivering speeds far in excess of what’s available over legacy copper networks that were built to provide voice telephony and which were never intended for broadband. The remaining 7% of homes, mainly in outlying areas, will be connected using satellite and fixed-wireless options because of the prohibitive cost of deploying fibre into places like the Outback.
The project is controversial but has the potential, assuming you believe in the transformative power of network-connected societies, to establish Australia as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.
Can SA afford to emulate the model? And if it can, should it? Australia decided free enterprise alone would never deliver a ubiquitous fibre network because of the huge costs involved. It’s gone back to the approach, held until relatively recently, that government should provide fixed communications infrastructure, at least in the last mile.
In SA, there’s been relatively little investment in fibre. Though there is a great deal of work happening in building fibre routes in and between cities and in the subsea cables that connect us to the global Internet, high-speed fibre-to-the-home connections in SA are nonexistent. Operators tend to say home fibre is inevitable but not now because there’s no investment case yet. That shouldn’t preclude the discussion and consideration of the Australian model, even if we decide eventually that it doesn’t make sense.
I’m not entirely sure the Australian approach is the right one for SA. I’m not even convinced it’s the right approach for a rich country like Australia! Effectively renationalising Telkom’s access network into homes like the Australians have done with Telstra would certainly be contentious.
But we shouldn’t shy away from talking about it even if the project could cost several hundred billion rand to ensure near-universal access. These are the conversations government, through the department of communications, ought to be having with industry.
We have plenty of smart business people and entrepreneurs who could take advantage of cheap and super-speedy broadband to build new information enterprises. If we get fibre into their hands, magic will surely follow. We need to weigh the opportunity cost.
- Duncan McLeod is editor of TechCentral; this column is also published in Financial Mail