Australia still lags Canada: State of the Internet

Despite intense political interest in the state of Australia's broadband infrastructure, four years on since the Rudd Government won the 2007 federal election (with broadband featuring heavy in the ALP's policy platform), not much has changed: Canada is still leading Australia in broadband access and speed.

Average Connection Speed

Canada has a decentralised telecommunications market, dominated by regional monopolies. However, there is significant competition between platforms, particularly ADSL (traditional telecommunications carriers) and HFC (cable television providers). A major difference is that the regulatory system enables greater access to  address anti-competitive practices, especially for smaller competitors.

Average Peak Connection Speed

Meanwhile, politicians insist on making imprecise comparisons between Australia and New Zealand, as Malcolm Turnbull did at his recent National Press Club address. The latest Akamai State of the Internet figures demonstrate that  comparing Australia with New Zealand is hardly inspiring:

Broadband speeds in Australia versus New Zealand

As two of the most similar countries in the world, Canada and Australia provide a unique comparative study for political scientists, enabling the adoption of Mill's method of difference to find the underlying cause of different outcomes. A key difference is the extent of decentralisation in Canada's communications industries.

High Speed Broadband Adoption

According to the latest Akamai State of the Internet report, Canada beats Australia on all measures of broadband adoption.

Broadband Adoption >2mbps

To prove the point, the only measure where Australia beats Canada is in the adoption of "Narrowband" - connections with speeds of less than 256kbps - which is hardly an enviable position. Enabling competition by freeing up the market from federal control is the only solution. When the NBN is completed in 2020, this will remain a short-term fix.

Narrowband Adoption

Mark my words: the underlying problem of political control of Australia's communications infrastructure will be back to haunt us at the next evolution. Indeed, it has happened repeatedly throughout the history of Australian telecommunications policy. The following is from the report of the Royal Commission into Postal, Telegraph and Telephone services of 1910:

The result of unduly curtailing expenditure was pointed out repeatedly by the Department, and the required provision was made on the Estimates, but was reduced by the Treasurer. The longer the reconstruction is deferred and the longer installation of a new system is postponed the more expensive the work becomes, on account of extensions made to the old system. Construction methods were found to be practically the same as in 1901, as the Department claimed it had been impossible to improve these methods since that date, although the adoption of improved methods would obviously have tended towards economy.

100 years on and communications infrastructure is still used as a "policy lever" to be pulled every time politicians need a boost in the polls. The trouble with the NBN, despite the obvious advantages in the mid-term, is that the new and improved policy lever is an investment of such staggering proportions that it will be difficult to pry it from the hands of those who wish to continue to play politics with this important infrastructure.

                                                                                                                       

Book Notes: "Europe in the Central Middle Ages, 962-1154" by Christopher Nugent Lawrence Brooke

Europe in the Central Middle Ages, 962-1154 by Christopher Nugent Lawrence Brooke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a hard read, but well worth the effort. I'd be particularly interested to see if there were major differences in style between the 1964 edition (the edition I read) and later re-writes. It was helpful to be reading the story of Saladin at the same time, at least to learn about the later parts of the period from a variety of perspectives. It would be useful for non-Europeans to have an atlas at hand, especially to identify the historical areas outlined. I'd recommend having a general understanding of the period before reading the book; otherwise, much of the detail will be lost on the novice reader. As for the book itself, it lost its coherent thread once the period of the crusades was entered: I am still not sure why the period selected focused so heavily on religious practice, as this was clearly not representative of the title. Nonetheless, well worth the effort to really round-out my understanding of the period, especially the detailed bibliographical notes provided at the beginning of each chapter. Not for the faint-hearted, but I really enjoy finding random old books, reading them, and then discovering they are classic in their field.



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NBN: The paths we didn’t take & why

This article appeared as "The NBN’s the culmination of 150 years of cock ups" on The Punch, 19 May 2011: http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/the-nbns-the-culmination-of-150-years-of-cock-ups/

Wednesday’s announcement that the NBN finally made it to the mainland was good news for the many Australians who have deplorable access to broadband services. But why did it take so long?

Simple: Australia’s communications policy-makers are bounded by a centrally-controlled, single-solution approach that has been around since the time of the telegraph. This model leaves no room for innovation, encourages contractors to artificially inflate prices, and stalls whenever a skeleton can be found in the closet of the head honcho of NBN Co.

When the Canadian Samuel McGowan brought the telegraph to Victoria in 1853, his plan to become a telegraph entrepreneur was thwarted by the Victorian government’s decision to rollout the telegraph network as a public monopoly.

Not long after, James McGeorge ignored the South Australian government’s declaration that only the government could own and operate telegraph networks. McGeorge had captured the market, causing ‘the immediate revenue’ from the government’s duplicate network to be ‘infinitesimal’. McGeorge’s reward for being innovative was to have his network forcibly purchased by the South Australian Government and subsequently dismantled to prevent further competition.

Fast-forward a century and a half later, and not much has changed. Backed by its constitutional mandate for communications policy, the federal government has opted to address Australia’s broadband woes by deploying another monopoly. Just like the telephone, radio and television technologies with which, despite popular sentiment, Australia was also a developed-world laggard, it has always been the same: Do nothing for years and then try to ‘catch-up’ using public money when the problem becomes obvious.

Recent events have revealed the downside to the centrally-controlled, single-solution approach. Instead of rolling out high-speed broadband to Australian citizens, NBN Co has been embroiled in a series of scandals such as contractors charging over-inflated prices and NBN head honcho Mike Quigley caught up in a drama that really has nothing to do with NBN Co. In the meantime, the announcement that the NBN has finally reached the mainland via Armidale is only good news for the handful of people signing up to trials via the NBN.

If a decentralised approach had been adopted, none of these dramas would have been so newsworthy as to take the focus away from the real issue: giving Australians access to broadband worthy of their status as some of the richest people in the world. This begs the question: Why is broadband so bad here?

It is easy to blame Telstra, and many do. But Telstra didn’t create itself, it was created by the federal government. The blame should go where it is due. But is it enough to engage in short-term blame-storming to find the answer? Enter serendipity.

McGowan brought the telegraph to Australia from Canada and he also brought a copy of the legislation that enabled the telegraph to be deployed. But he wasn’t able to bring the decentralised policy approach that has enabled Canadians to be at the forefront of broadband technologies and the associated services years ahead of their Australian counterparts.

Solving Australia’s broadband problems requires a longer-term view which is hard to fathom through a short-term lens – what worked in the past doesn’t work now. But our institutions aren’t capable of letting go of communications policy as a lever for political goals, even though these goals are no longer congruent with the brave policy agenda that opened Australia’s protected economy to global competition some 30-odd years ago.

Australian policy-makers on both sides of politics must let go of the social-democratic past and forget about trying to provide the same level of service to everybody. Given the snail-like pace of the NBN’s deployment, by the time everyone gets access to high-speed broadband it will be time for another government-controlled monopoly to rollout the next communications innovation.

It is now common knowledge that when governments intervene in markets, they invariably create false market conditions which often end badly – the roof insulation scheme is an obvious recent example. Focusing on competition through a variety of approaches to the deployment of broadband technologies through a variety of government and industry players would have avoided the problems facing NBN Co right now.

Regardless, with a century and a half of policy-making experience focused on centrally-controlled, single-solution approaches to deploying communications technologies, Australia will be hard-pressed to adapt to the inherent complexity of the information revolution that is happening whether Australians have access to high-speed broadband or not.