Australia is among the world leaders in broadband penetration and regular claims to the contrary are bad for business, iiNet managing director Michael Malone told a WA Business News Success & Leadership breakfast last week.
Australia is among the world leaders in broadband penetration and regular claims to the contrary are bad for business, iiNet managing director Michael Malone told a WA Business News Success & Leadership breakfast last week.
Mr Malone also questioned the federal government's planned broadband initiative, which is designed to extend high-speed (12 megabits or higher) broadband connections to 98 per cent of Australians at a cost of $9.5 billion.
He believes this is not possible, and cited industry estimates suggesting the cost could be as high as $25 billion.
"The problem with this, as everyone in the sector knows, is that it's actually impossible to deliver," Mr Malone said.
"You can't deliver fibre-to-the-node to 98 per cent of homes in Australia."
Mr Malone said it remained unclear who was meant to bear the cost of the proposed FTTN network.
The estimated cost was between $30 and $50 extra per month for metropolitan households.
The locations that are most economic to build FTTN, which have relatively high population density, do not need it because they already get equivalent internet speeds through ADSL2 services, he said.
To put this debate in context, Mr Malone said broadband penetration in Australia has risen rapidly to 64 per cent of households, up from just 7 per cent in 2003.
Penetration is forecast to increase to 81 per cent in 2010 and 87 per cent in 2012.
International comparisons by the Paris-based OECD use a different measure - the number of broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants.
The latest data for June 2007 shows Australia has about 23 subscribers for every 100 inhabitants.
This puts Australia above the OECD average of 19, and on a par with places including the UK, the US and France.
Mr Malone said he was frustrated by misinformed criticism of broadband services in Australia.
"I find this really annoying," he said.
"Our politicians keep on saying Australia is falling behind the rest of the world, it's fraudband. That's bad for consumer confidence and its bad for business.
"We should be up there crowing from the rooftops that we are leading the world."
Looking ahead at potential uses of high-speed broadband, he said video conferencing was likely to become more widely used.
A variant on this is e-medicine, but Mr Malone is sceptical, believing that people will continue to seek face-to-face contact with doctors.
Another likely application is online gaming, which includes online gambling but more significantly will be what he called 'shoot 'em up' games.
A third likely application is IPTV, or internet protocol television.
