Forget FTTP, the NBN is about the apps
- 09 June, 2009 16:40
- Comments 7
The laboratory director of one of Australia’s leading ICT research and development organisations has claimed the national broadband network (NBN) is all about the applications, not the fibre.
While the NBN discourse has been dominated by discussion over its cost and whether to go ahead with a Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) architecture, NICTA laboratory director, Dr Terry Percival, said there would be significant advances in application innovation.
“The action is going to be in the applications you run over the network,” Percival said. “Passive optical networks have been rolled out in other parts of the world already, and I am sure people will tweak and tune on it but I don’t think there is major room for innovation in that space, particularly in Australia. It is going to be one of the big four or five companies that are going to do the rollout. The innovation is now going to be about what you do with it and the new opportunities it is going to create.”
The NBN leap frogged Australia over many other parts of the world, he said, and pointed to the development of applications in healthcare, education, social networking and general business as primary areas where innovation would occur and opportunities arise.
“It’s not just getting the nurse to log on everyday and say, ‘Hello, how are you Mrs Smith?’. It’s more about people using it as a source of information,” Percival said.
“That’s for the whole home healthcare sector. And it’s for a huge variety of illnesses and saves people from going to the GP unnecessarily. It also gives them a daily management of their condition, which is much better because they don’t have to wait two weeks to go to the GP. The cost savings are enormous.”
However, he put particular emphasis on educational applications and the expected ubiquity of mobile computing.
“We are now giving all our students one laptop and they are going to take it home. So if you have a family with three children who each have a laptop they are going need a lot of bandwidth to get out there,” he said.
“The whole availability of online content is ramping up. Students are going to access the content including video tutorials. Some interesting technologies need to be developed to do mash ups.”
In terms of the platforms or programming languages the expected applications will be built on, Percival claimed a need for innovation.
“Some of it will be built on existing tools, but there has to be some real technologies that come out,” he said.
In recent days the Rudd Government has opened a consultation process to ensure that FTTP technology is installed in all new substantial greenfield property developments from July 1, 2010.
And research commissioned by Big Blue, and conducted by Access Economics, claimed the NBN would facilitate the evolution of the Australian economy to smart infrastructure.
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Comments
Observer
The apps or he fibre? Both...!
As with symbiosis, the apps will not run to the broader community without the fibre, and the apps will fund and drive the fibre roll-out. We need FTTP in order to broadly access and deliver these commercially and publicly critical applications. Home healthcare apps alone, factored over the next decade, will more than justify the FTTP / NBN / SNN...
Anonymous
Yeah, like a GP will measure your blood pressure over the NBN! Or your GP stick a needle in your arm over the NBN.
Are you people serious?
The bandwidth needed to log medical data is trivial. There is nothing much that couldn't be done today without an NBN, and it simply isn't happening today. And it isn't because of a lack of bandwidth or an NBN.
Anonymous
half full
to the 21:42 poster.
if this country had the same outlook and vision you have we would still be using the telegraph system.
i agree totally with the argument been shifted from a question of bandwidth to a question of what will be possible. why is it impossible for a GP to check your blood pressure remotely. it is only impossible becuase you make it so. if we can put an over priced remote control car on another PLANET, the possibilites of NBN are only limited to your imagination .
FFT
Paleoflatus
Not new competition!
The problem with initiating fast, cheap internet in Australia is not the cost, or the technology. It's overcoming the resistance of established interest groups in our highly protected society.
Wide-ranging changes in the way we work, shop, communicate, play, learn etc. would follow, as we already have the technology for these things, but they are crippled by our expensive, restricted, slow current system.
Opening the flood-gates would hurt, or force change upon hugely profitable groups such as old-fashioned TV and radio, phone companies, video stores, retailers, etc. and bring competition (perish the thought!) to Australia.
I wonder what's really at the root of our procrastination?
Anonymous
Change is an imperative
NBN is a part of the change imperative rolling across the globe. Resistance to change comes from those who have profitted from past ways and cannot see how to profit from this expanded future.
Imagine that we decided to build a new and duplicate national highway system. Duplicate the city freeways, provide other dual/triple carriage ways between all major regional service centres. Do you not think Australia would change? The NBN is no different except it is a lot cheaper than roads.
The NBN is not about cost of Internet browsing for entertainment. It is really about changing the way we interact as a society in the same way that the adoption of the original telephone service required government intervention.
The original Telstra was the "Post Master General" (or PMG) and it was through their charter that Australia was finally able to have a phone service cheaply accessable to ALL homes in Australia.
The PMG changed society. I don't know if the NBN will have the same level of impact, but it will change Australian society, only quicker!
Anonymous
Change is an imperative
NBN is a part of the change imperative rolling across the globe. Resistance to change comes from those who have profitted from past ways and cannot see how to profit from this expanded future.
Imagine that we decided to build a new and duplicate national highway system. Duplicate the city freeways, provide other dual/triple carriage ways between all major regional service centres. Do you not think Australia would change? The NBN is no different except it is a lot cheaper than roads.
The NBN is not about cost of Internet browsing for entertainment. It is really about changing the way we interact as a society in the same way that the adoption of the original telephone service required government intervention.
The original Telstra was the "Post Master General" (or PMG) and it was through their charter that Australia was finally able to have a phone service cheaply accessable to ALL homes in Australia.
The PMG changed society. I don't know if the NBN will have the same level of impact, but it will change Australian society, only quicker!
swordfishBob
Advances
I agree it's not just about "more of the same".
Speaking of things that couldn't be done today without NBN - Anonymous must be thinking of things that are already feasible and already largely happening. Initially, IBM's CEO thought there might be use for about 5 computers in the world.
NBN is about several things:
- faster access
- broader availability of fast access (!!!)
- restructuring telecomms in Australia (!!!)
This would make a big difference to things we can already imagine as they already occur in a limited fashion: videocalling/conferencing, telecommuting, VPN between business premises (already done, but vastly more useful if it was 10-100x faster and had 1/10th the latency), instant replay of TV programs (without being hamstrung by a single ISP's choices in TV network deals).
Remote and multi-site education is significant. My employer would be very happy if our electrical apprentices didn't have to drive a 5-hour round trip every fortnight to attend TAFE. Some would say we're lucky to be so close!
Living equidistant between two capitol cities, getting to either is a challenge. I can attend webinars using my ADSL connection, but not courses with full bidirectional video interaction.
The keys are:
- restructuring, so instead of having exactly 1 ISP for all network access of any kind, you can have one for general and international internet access, but also subscribe to a college/uni for education resources in an enrolled course, a TV network for advanced features utilising distributed caches, a telco who may or may not support video calls, etc
- ubiquity - don't stop deploying based on the size of the town, just keep going. Prior to NextG's deployment, Telstra had been running fibre on rural routes, yes, to farms, with a small-scale FTTN called ScaDS to provide voice and basic-rate ISDN. Presumably they thought that more viable than installing more RIMs and replacing old copper with new copper. If they could do that while under the squeeze for commercial profitability, surely the NBN can honour the word "National" in its name.
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