NBN - What it is Really About
I've been following the debate over recent months about the NBN in Australia, and to be quite frank have found people have a fair bit of misunderstanding about what it means to this country. Arguments for and against seem to blur the real benefit that the NBN will deliver.
To attempt to bring this focus back on track for me at least, I plan on taking a little tour of the average Australian house, and the services that are provided.
- Electricity - Electricity powers almost everything in our house, the washing machine, television, air conditioning, heaters, recharges batteries, soon may even power our cars. It even powers the computer I'm creating this blog entry on. Electricity certainly makes our lives interesting.
- Water - Can you believe it, it is amazing - we can turn on a tap and water appears IN OUR HOUSE. Kings and Queens of old had water brought to them in buckets - yet we just turn on the tap and wash, drink or water the plants. In Australia, we have of course started to think responsibly about water use, but it is still a miracle.
- Copper - Nearing the end of their usefulness, our land lines have created over the last century a world so interconnected that it has shrunk the world to nothing. The copper providing these telephones has been stretched to breaking point to deliver not just phone services, but a shaky but amazing connection via data to the world.
Think about these services that you have taken for granted probably since you were born. How do we talk about these services? We talk about them (for the most part) as essential to our very existence.
I'm going to add a fourth one now, one more recently accessed - and attach to it, how it is currently seen by many people.
- Internet - Download music, download movies, download websites, download pictures, download the news. Be careful not to download too much, in case you run out of Megabytes - and sometimes it is slow because of the low Megabits/second. My router needs a fair bit of fiddling to get it working sometimes, and frequently I have to change the line settings with my ISP to avoid dropouts. When it rains, the speed slows. I have to choose between ADSL, ADSL2+, ADSL Annex M, Cable, Satellite or 3G or sometimes dialup. Depending on which I use, I need different plugs, adapters and I ... well you get the idea.
I admit, I exaggerated a bit - very few people go through all of those at the same time, but for the general populace - all of that is frequently encountered by someone on a daily basis.
So, what is the NBN about? The NBN is about making the Internet as ubiquitous, as reliable, and as essential as the other services I mentioned above. It's about transforming the Internet from a luxury or a convenience into an integral part of our daily lives, much like electricity or water.
When the NBN is fully implemented, the Internet will no longer be something we think about in terms of megabytes or connection types. It will be a seamless service that we use without a second thought, enabling new technologies and services that we can't even imagine today.
In the future, just as we don't think about the infrastructure that brings water or electricity into our homes, we won't think about the infrastructure that brings the Internet into our homes. It will just be there, always on, always reliable, and capable of meeting all our communication needs.
That's the real promise of the NBN. It's not just about faster downloads or better streaming. It's about creating a platform for innovation, for new services and applications that will define the future.