Political debate over the NBN may be highly charged, but there’s no agreed position within industry as to the best plan for the nation’s future needs.
Political debate over the NBN may be highly charged, but there’s no agreed position within industry as to the best plan for the nation’s future needs.
MICHAEL Malone is an unabashed supporter of the National Broadband Network.
After years of aggressive growth, both organically and by acquisition, Mr Malone’s listed internet service provider, iiNet, is the third largest player in the nation behind telco majors Telstra and Optus.
He sees the NBN delivering three important things for his business: the end of dealing with a retail competitor as a wholesale network provider; a viable way of competing for as much as 50 per cent of the market in areas that could not be reached by iiNet; and a reliable platform to replace the ageing network, which creates too much uncertainty in his business model.
Mr Malone said the ADSL broadband network he operates using boxes called DSLAMs – housed in many of the 2,500 exchanges operated by his retail rival Telstra – was fragile due to its reliance on an old copper network designed to cater for a steady flow of telephone traffic, not the data tsunami that now inundates it.
“It is a miracle that ADSL works at all,” Mr Malone told a recent online business forum hosted by WA Business News.
The iiNet founder said that alternatives didn’t offer the same ubiquity and reliability as fibre.
While Mr Malone would be expected to back a $40 billion capital expenditure that favours his business, some other attendees at the forum were surprisingly critical of the federal government’s strategy.
Amcom group executive networks and technology, Richard Whiting, questioned the cost of the NBN and was also concerned that WA was a low priority in the national rollout.
The listed company he works for owns and operates more than 2,100 kilometres of fibre-optic network in Perth, Adelaide and Darwin. Amcom is also an ISP to business.
Despite this wariness, Mr Whiting said Amcom’s business was planning to take advantage of the NBN’s provision of high bandwidth links to the rest of the country, including regional Western Australia, if and when that occurred.
“We see the NBN providing access to other markets,” he said.
Telstra Mk II?
One of the biggest issues to arise from the online business forum was the 20-year problem that every telco and ISP has faced – the fact that Telstra is a network monopoly and the deal done by the federal government means that will be transferred to the national broadband network operator.
Ipernica group managing director Simon Crowther was one who voiced his concerns with that element of the NBN. His company, which is a subsidiary of listed group ipernica, runs two data centres of its own and has huge data demands.
“My own personal experience is that I had to move house and it took three weeks to move my naked ADSL,” he said.
“Clearly there’s an issue from the consumer point of view.
“I am not convinced by the NBN; that is transferring from one monopoly to another monopoly.
“We don’t have enough choice; I am wondering if giving it back to the government is adding to that choice.”
Rob Evans, managing director of IT consulting business Velrada, also had concerns about the government’s plan, particularly its ability to deliver.
“My fear is that the government’s approach is to build another Telstra,” Mr Evans said, also alluding to the NBN’s monopoly position as a network provider.
“In the way government procures and designs these things, there is an inherent disadvantage, it is a very slow and cumbersome approach.”
Mr Evans believes the country would have ended up with a better result if a hybrid approach had been taken rather than one-size-fits-all.
This was a common theme in criticising the fibre-only network being created by the NBN.
Charlie Gunningham, who is manager of reiwa.com at the Real Estate Institute of WA and a former internet entrepreneur and founder of Aussiehome.com, sees this as a concern.
“The whole world is moving to mobile, or have I missed something?” Mr Gunningham said.
He said REIWA’s mobile traffic was currently about 9 per cent of its total and the organisation expected that to rise to 50 per cent in three years.
“It’s either mobile or touch,” Mr Gunningham told the forum.
Picking winners
The feeling that other technologies might offer cheaper, more flexible and faster solutions to the constraints of the existing copper network was another common theme raised at the forum.
For some it was experience in trying to manage networks of their own – and the challenge in choosing the right technology to provide long-term infrastructure when it could be left behind.
Rio Tinto Iron Ore chief information officer Rohan Davidson said working for a mining giant gave him a different perspective, with the challenges of remote sites and a big fly-in, fly-out workforce testing his systems in unique ways.
Try managing the online needs of up to 12,000 employees stationed in an outback location with little else to do.
Rio Tinto also runs a remote operations centre in the Perth Airport precinct, running significant Pilbara mining and rail operations, including driverless vehicles, from the comfort of Perth.
Mr Davidson said there was a danger in trying to pick winners because technology was changing so fast, and Rio Tinto was looking at the possibility of mobile for this very reason.
“We are looking to build a broad-scale data network in the Pilbara for our equipment to connect into, so we are looking at the technologies,” he said.
“Two years ago we were looking at Mesh, last year we were looking at 3G and now we are looking at 4G.”
Mr Davidson said technology could also be made to do more than expected, as had been proved with the existing copper networks and fibre.
“The fibre we laid (in the Pilbara) 10 years ago we can do inconceivable things with now,” he said.
Cloud over cable
GoPC founder Graeme Speak believes the cloud offers a cheaper alternative than fibre.
His firm offers cloud services for businesses and claims that users only need the simplest of connections to operate systems that are distant but need little data transfer to work.
“The NBN is kind of good for business but for consumers it will just be there for video,” Mr Speak said.
“I don’t see the value in it.”
“I can do basically everything over the smallest connection, you don’t need a big connection.”
But this approach also had its critics.
Australian Computer Society vice-president, community boards, Jim Ellis is a big backer of the NBN and doesn’t believe other technology offers the flexibility and opportunity of fibre, especially in the regional areas where a big part of the cost of unrolling it will be.
Mr Ellis questioned how the cloud could work for those needing to move big amounts of data, such as businesses that have big offsite back-up requirements or industries like the health sector, which has to move big files such as x-rays.
He said other technologies had limitations compared with fibre.
Mr Malone was equally critical of trying to find untried alternatives when his business had a problem with the existing network’s current ability to deal with the traffic, let alone what it might be able to do in the future.
He said about three quarters of his 2,000 staff were involved in call centre activity, quite often dealing with customer issues on the network.
“Fifteen per cent of our client base has 35 or more drop outs per day on their connection ... now try running critical services over something like that,” Mr Malone said.
