What the National Broadband Network won't do: open your eyes for you

Does the NBN represent or promote revolution or evolution? Are these words polar opposites with a clear distinction - or simply partners in change? In any case, does it really matter which word we choose?

The National Broadband Network will - for most Australians - mean a seriously large increase in effective, available bandwidth. Whilst many Australians already have ADSL1 or even 2, they are currently hamstrung both by distance from their local exchange and the price they pay for that bandwidth. Together, these factors seriously undermine the reach and effectiveness of current networks. For many people even ABC iView is slow and jerky, something that doesn't improve until you hit the mid-to-top-end of ADSL1. If you are a bandwidth cellar-dweller, restricted by either pipesize or a crippling monthly download limit, it's unlikely that you'll bother to watch IP TV, stream video or audio, or download movies. Limited audio downloads and short, low-quality embedded videos are probably the new media limit for many. So there's a bottleneck here that the NBN will likely fix, unleashing a tsunami of existing content (I'm avoiding saying 'torrent', since that's not really what I mean), once people realise what's available. It will also encourage the creation of new media sites, new content and new ways to interact. It will certainly increase the use of live streaming video, both up and downstream. You can of course stream yourself live now, but with an increased pipesize it becomes so much more viable: anyone can become a broadcaster, good or bad

Of course it doesn't end there. The bigger, more available pipe simply opens up many possibilities for shuttling data around the country. Media appliances like TVs, radios and sound systems will inevitably become connected to the Internet, and content availability will drive adoption of these new products. Cloud computing becomes a reality for both the home and small business, reducing the need for ever-larger storage devices (for your digital images, videos and data) and ever-more-powerful computer processors; leading to smaller form factors and further convergence of appliances. If you currently have a business (or government service) that could deliver - or make use of - content over the Internet, well here's your chance. Health services, education, employee training, remote delivery of problem diagnosis and support - you name it, it will come - if the price is right. (And it's so far so good on that score - we will have to see what it finally means in terms of pricing.) That could be seen as an incremental evolution of what we already have, or for some it could be a dramatic game-changer.

So with that context in mind, the comment below could be News Ltd’s digital boss, Richard Freudenstein, making a pedantic distinction between 'evolution' and 'revolution', or it could be someone who wants to downplay the whole thing:

‘‘What most people in media immediately think of is super-fast internet and all that it brings: faster browsing, hundreds of TV channels, video on demand and so on,’’ he told an advertising and marketing summit yesterday.

‘‘But, in my opinion, this is less important than the way the NBN could revolutionise other industries and how this can improve people’s lives. In comparison, I believe that the change the NBN will have for the media industry is an evolution, rather than a revolution.’’

He added that, ‘‘For a lot of things people want to do the broadband we have now is probably quick enough to allow that to happen,’’ he said. NBN ‘‘will just be an extension of what is already happening.’’

He makes a good point, that in some senses both health services and education are laggards in tech terms and are really not using what bandwidth is available now, but the opposing view may be that both of these sectors have awakened and are increasingly using the Internet for content and service delivery. In either view the NBN will make a real difference in timing of technical advances as well as in reach and scope of change. Is that a revolution then, for health and education? Or evolution? It's a coin toss, or a perspective issue.

Turning to media delivery, we can make the same argument, as Freudenstein does, that we already have enough available bandwidth to make the changes we can imagine. We already have enough bandwidth to converge our TVs with our computers, to download movies and to connect our appliances with the cloud. And there are plenty of early adopters at that cutting edge. So in that view the NBN will represent just more of the same. The alternative view however is that the NBN will dramatically lift the numbers, far quicker than the current rate of uptake. As an enabler of change, the NBN must therefore rate pretty highly. And if we get to a mass connectedness more quickly, we also foster innovation in content creation and delivery that much faster. For existing media creators and delivery systems - be it the free or pay-TV operators, the radio stations or even early new media on the Web - that means that both opportunity and challenge arrives earlier rather than later.

Call it what you like, it's still a game-changer.

You can read the above quotes in context here at Business Day: http://snipurl.com/o933p

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