Catherine Middleton’s tweet last week pointed me to a report out of the Australian Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network (“NBN“) [
pdf, 1.2MB] that has a number of recommendations. By the way, you should add @catmiddleton to your must follow list.
The recommendations lead with:
That the Implementation Plan clearly states the government’s intention to prioritise the needs of underserviced communities, particularly those in regional, rural and remote areas, over those with comparatively well-serviced urban areas.
In other words, before you spend $43B to lay new fibre in urban locations that have working broadband, let’s start off with the outer reaches.
The report also calls for a rigorous cost-benefit analysis, open to public scrutiny, of the NBN proposal prior to acquiring assets. If the study concludes the NBN project specifications are unrealistic, not practical or uneconomical, the government is being asked to reassess its overall policy approach.
It is one thing to set a vision – it is also important that governments are prudent in spending. The Senate Committee also called for the government to advocate the development of new applications to facilitate economic development and improvements in health, education and energy efficiency. These were seen to provide greater opportunities for commercial viability of broadband networks.
That sounds like helping stimulate the demand side of the equation. It is nice to see the Australian Senate committee echoing our view that stimulus for broadband adoption has to consider more than just the supply side denominator; we need to consider stimulus programs for the demand side numerator as well.