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.

Broadbanding the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

Tomorrow I present my early findings from research conducted in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The presentation will be delivered at the Australian and New Zealand School of Government's Institute for Governance seminar series at the University of Canberra.

Considering Jordan's GDP per capita is about 13 times less than Australia's, broadband services are very good. I was able to access a variety of Wimax and ADSL services from Amman, Aqaba and Irbid and could easily purchase additional gigabytes of download access as required. Compared to Palmerston in the ACT, Jordan's broadband performance was outstanding.

I am interested in the development of institutions. Jordan's relatively new institutions and their recent development provided me with a unique and less ethno-centric view of the policy world. I am particularly grateful to the Princess Sumaya University for Technology for their support during my time in Jordan and also Aqaba Adventure Divers who provided me with much needed accommodation during the Eid Al-Adha period.

Below is a copy of the presentation. More will be forthcoming in the new year as I look at the institutions in the communications industries of Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Broadbanding the nation: Jordan

View more presentations from Michael de Percy.

Photograph: Copyright © 2009 Michael de Percy, taken in Jordan, 20 November 2009

The "My Lecturer" Website: Students trump government

A while back Julia Gillard suggested the ...My University“ website would force boring university lecturers to lift their game. But it seems that the government has missed the boat to stir up these old bores. And a group of students has taken the initiative to stir up the insomnia-curers on their own terms.

This initiative, the My Lecturer website: http://mylecturer.net.au/, brings to Australia an idea that started in the US with websites such as Rate My Professor. Admirably, the Australian site is cautious about defamation and actively encourages students to be constructive in their feedback. But is it a good thing or a bad thing for Australian higher education?

For proponents of open academia, a growing movement which believes all educational materials and information should be publicly available; it might be a good thing. But for traditionalists, it might just be the scariest thing in the world!

Open academia includes initiatives such as Wikiversity, a site dedicated to enabling academics to put their course materials in the public realm, are growing in popularity. Such initiatives threaten to disrupt higher education industries such as textbook publishers and even research journals as a growing number of academics move their materials into the public realm. This is significant as entire industries worldwide are at stake, but so is the future of higher education.

Open education asks the question of existing education institutions: Who is education for? From a purely liberal perspective, open education provides everyone with equality of opportunity – if the materials are freely available, we all have the opportunity to receive an education. We might have to pay for the qualification, but at least the education is free.

But many traditionalists see this 'power to the people' approach as little short of a 'dumbing down' of the best of our educational institutions. Indeed, a colleague recently recalled to me a documentary from years ago where an old British professor suggested that ...bad teaching is a tradition. How else would we get our students to learn for themselves?“ Certainly some food for thought there!

But what of the My Lecturer site? And just how 'open' should open education be?

The furore over the 'My School' website saw unintended consequences such as teachers helping students to cheat 'no doubt so that either the teachers' careers were not jeopardised or that the students' education wasn't seen in a bad light. Or more likely both. But government should have seen this coming from a mile off. Everybody knows that Ivy League tables are anti-egalitarian – or dare I say it – they are just plain unAustralian.

What makes the My Lecturer site different is that it is not something imposed by government, but it is an initiative from the students themselves. As one who encourages students to take the initiative and stake a claim in their own future, it is very difficult to see the My Lecturer site as anything but positive.

Traditionalists might be opposed, but these same people are more likely to be those who have some hidden interest to protect. The big test will be whether the open academia crew accept this type of openness, or if they are only in favour of openness which they themselves create

The times are a-changing for the higher education sector, but the same is true for most sectors of the economy. Indeed, access to technology is fulfilling what Manuel Castells (among others) predicted well before today's capabilities were a practical reality. But where does it all end?

From the very early findings of my research into the use of openness via technology in organisations to date, openness results in higher quality, increased productivity, better recognition of high-performing individuals, and overall improved organisational performance. It is simply more difficult for poor performance to go unchecked in an open organisational culture.

But does this justify the PM targeting 'boring lecturers' with the My University website? It is a bit rich when the leader of a political party that can barely form government makes an assumption about the performance of individual lecturers in a sector she hasn't experienced for many years.

But John Howard held a similar view a few years ago and provided funding to universities on the basis of workplace relations reforms, including the introduction of individual performance management techniques as a condition of funding.

Strangely enough, some of us lowly lecturers have already been putting our teaching feedback from these publicly-funded ...performance initiatives“ into the public realm on our blogs or even Wikiversity. The original intention by government may have been to intimidate, but with the majority of lecturers focused on providing the best possible skills and intellectual development for our students, and many of us seeing the benefits of openness, it should be no surprise that government misunderstands the higher education sector.

But now that the My Lecturer website has emerged from out of nowhere to trump bad lecturers, reward good lecturers, and provide future students with feedback which is not tainted by a self-interested government, it is my hope that the government's My University website is passé. For that, the team of students who put the My Lecturer website together are to be applauded and I trust that the new model will break down the old hierarchy of higher education.

Openness is, after all, in all of our best interests.