Getting connected
My issue today is about equity of access to technology. We live in a vast nation. Roughly 7.692 million square kilometres. Our population is not evenly spread across this vast nation with 66 per cent of Aussies living in our capital cities.
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The challenge for any Federal Government is to balance the cheaper delivery of services in an urban area with the equity of service desire across the nation.
To demonstrate what I mean, we should jump back to the nineties. Those were the days when you accessed the Internet via a telephone line using a modem.
We all became accustomed to the screeching noises made by the equipment plugged into our computer. The Internet Service Provider (ISP) plans were based on time not data and the term “dial-up” became mainstream.
I really can’t remember how much was typically paid per hour to connect to the Internet but it wasn’t much and some providers offered a daily rate of a few dollars.
Plus the cost of the phone call.
And that is where the disparity occurred.
In any of the capital cities you could dial up all day for the cost of a local call and just pay your ISP for their charges.
In regional areas, it was different.
Very few regional locations had a local ISP therefore every call to your ISP was a long-distance call.
There was no such thing as a plan that had capped STD calls so the most significant cost for a user in Dubbo was the phone call.
I discussed this issue with our Federal Government at the time and gave them my brilliant idea.
At the time, there was a focus on trying to build more ISPs in regional Australia but I had a much simpler solution.
Don’t spend large chunks of government money on infrastructure. Spend slightly smaller chunks of government money on subsidisation.
The only issue was the cost of the phone call so I lobbied the Government to introduce a free phone call for regional users.
I wasn’t successful but a couple of years later Telstra introduced a new plan.
It went halfway there – it gave users of the service a toll-free number to call for their Internet access but at a dearer rate to use the ISP.
Not perfect but it was a subsidisation and it made sense.
From all those years ago you would think that we have learned the lesson and wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes with the NBN.
Think again.
The Australian Government is currently in the process of launching the Sky Muster satellites. The cost of this infrastructure is in the order of $2 billion to start with plus the running costs.
It has an estimated life of fifteen years.
We are told this will service 200,000 people.
That is $10,000 per person just to launch.
What I am seeing is that many people are unhappy with the latency; speed and data limits from pieces of equipment sitting 35,786km above the equator so in areas where mobile service is available – even if only just available – many users are choosing to use mobile broadband despite the fact that this often comes at higher prices.
There are obviously locations where there is no mobile service.
I would prefer to see special mobile broadband pricing or subsidies for users that can’t access other forms of NBN.
$2 billion buys a lot of subsidisation – or maybe even put up a few new mobile phone towers!
For those in areas that are definitely not going to receive mobile phone reception, there are over 1000 active satellites in our sky at the moment so I am quite certain that the owners of those satellites would welcome more connections to their satellites.
Once again, a government subsidy to these users would seem like a better solution than spending our money on infrastructure.
If only we could learn from the past.