NBN Advertising: Dodgy use of public monies?

It doesn't take a genius to work out that the National Broadband Network will change a few things for the average Australian.

Indeed, if you live in any Australian suburb like Palmerston via Gungahlin and you have recently received a little "mail out" from NBN Co in your letterbox, any improvement in service delivery will be a welcome change from the archaic services currently experienced at "top of the range" prices.

I am now paying $AUD 99.95 per month for a Telstra wireless service with a theoretical speed of 8mbps, but when you see the reality of my speed test (presented here courtesy of ozspeedtest.com at the time of writing) it is very different:

Before the peanut gallery chimes in with "oh, you should get a plan with... [blah, blah, blah], let me tell you something: it is simply not available here in Palmerston via Gungahlin, especially ADSL. You might also see from my speed test that tonight is a good night, but it doesn't matter because the download limit on Telstra's wireless service here is 15GB per month. Even if I offered Telstra $1 million per month, as a consumer, I am on the absolute best of the premium plans available in this area.

What rattles me about the NBN is that a while back, I attended a community meeting run by NBN Co where they kept asking us "what will you do with high-speed broadband?" I wasn't interested in discussing this with them. Frankly, it is none of their business. But what made matters worse was that some random NBN Co employee emerged from the audience and admitted that he had been sitting among us to hear what we had been saying. This made me feel pretty much that this was all a government-controlled freak show. At this point, it still didn't bother me so much so I said nothing more of it. Until now, that is!

So when I received an NBN Co "mail out" this week inviting me:

To find out what the NBN rollout means to Gungahlin and the exciting benefits fibre optic broadband could bring to you and your community, come to our information session on Saturday 12 May any time between 11am and 3pm...

I decided immediately that I was not interested in attending. All I want to know is: When will I get access to NBN? In October 2010, at the last community meeting on NBN at the Palmerston Community Centre, we were invited to "dream" about the NBN and how we might use it. But the biggest question on everybody's lips was simply: "When do we get it?"

Yet here we are, 18 months later and well past the September 2011 date "mentioned" at the last community meeting in October 2010 for the rollout to begin, and nothing has changed.

What is quite clear is that the consultation process is all just "spin". I expect politicians to bore me with their spin. But what really gets up my nose is when public monies are used to pay for that spin.

Not a day goes by when I don't see NBN advertisements appearing on television or in my letterbox. Yet I don't believe a single word: it is all just spin.

Spin from politicians is a political reality: it is a farce packaged as "democracy" and I have little choice but to live with it. But when I have to pay for the spin, this is when I really feel insulted.

Surely every advertisement about the NBN is election campaigning which citizens pay for? How this is legal defies logic. If they were telling me WHEN I might be able to access NBN, I might be a little less bothered. But in the meantime, spending public money to ask me to "come dream about NBN" while effectively delaying the rollout date is a complete "rock show".

As much as the Opposition is to blame for getting us here in the [broadband] first place, the fact that they haven't whispered a word about public-funded electioneering demonstrates that they really did set such a low standard during the Howard Government's "Workchoices" campaign that they have nowhere else to go on this obvious misuse of public monies.

As for NBN, the current situation where taxpayers are paying to have their intelligence insulted is nothing short of ridiculous. The publicly-funded advertisements about NBN should be withdrawn immediately.

NBN Co not fast enough, but Coalition shouldn't talk

Personal experience of NBN'nt

I delivered a lecture yesterday morning and after speaking for nearly two hours non-stop, I had lost my voice. By mid-afternoon I had cancelled my evening lecture and the dreaded Canberra flu had struck its first blow. 

Today I was forced to go to the doctor, and antibiotics were on the menu. Thankfully, Palmerston via Gungahlin has its own medical centre with great doctors and a chemist run by a very knowledgeable pharmacist.

But before I travelled the 600m to the medical centre, I thought I would save myself the slightly longer trip to the Medicare/Centrelink shop-front in Gungahlin and register for Medicare's online service. I remembered going to the doctor last year and hadn't registered so my Medicare claim could be lodged immediately by the medical centre.

Here the drama began. To get a Medicare account, I had to login to my australia.gov.au account. My password didn't seem to work so I requested a new one through the "lost password" function. Moments later I had a new password. When I tried to login to Medicare, my password was wrong.

So I end up adding a Centrelink account (no idea why), but still it wouldn't work. Clicking on the Medicare "lost password" link just gave me a 404 Error. Ten minutes later, and I found a different "lost password" link for Medicare. And it worked... well, almost. I was subsequently advised that my new password was in the... wait for it... POST!

I decided to call Medicare and after a five-minute wait (in the 1990s the wait could be hours!) the friendly Department of Human Services (the name always reminds me of the film Metropolis) officer had issued me a temporary password, and I was registered. Yay!

But when I arrived at the Palmerston Medical Centre, the first thing I noticed was a sign which read (words to the effect of):

Due to an unreliable Internet connection we are no longer able to provide electronic lodgement of Medicare claims. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

I could have cried: Palmerston via Gungahlin. I empathised with my neighbours because 600m down the street it was certainly no better.

Don't forget who brought us here

While the Coalition is having lots of fun with NBN Co's slow roll-out and poor take-up, it is important to remember who was the party in power that got us here in the first place. If the Coalition is in charge after the next election, I doubt Palmerston via Gungahlin will be any better off.

The problem with communications technologies in Australia is and has always been that it is caught up in politics. The Coalition may have a decentralised and technologically-neutral approach to improving broadband, but this policy is just a different model of the same government-controlled monolith.

Until consumers can simply purchase services from businesses that simply provide the service, the politics of communications policy in this country will never end. Today provided me with first-hand experience of just how political even simple services like lodging an online Medicare claim can be. 

In a country that prides itself on being disinterested in politics, we sure do lead an overly-political lifestyle. While the communications industry remains a big policy lever, I can't see the situation changing regardless of the ruling party.

iPad only one technology, schools fall for good marketing

Tablet PC Episode XXIV
(Photo by Jim Henderson)

I recall MAD Magazine making fun of the endless Rocky sequels during the 1980s, Rocky fighting in his late 90s, Rocky XXIV screening in 2015, that sort of thing. We ended up with Rocky VI in 2006 but you get the idea.

Yet Apple seems to be challenging Rocky as the never-ending-sequel par excellence. It appears that no sooner is a new iPad released, that yet another new iPad is being released. How can we possibly keep up with all of these changes in a corporate environment?

Put simply, we can't, and we shouldn't.

BYO technology is the answer, where people use their own devices. But this means that corporate systems need to be revamped to cope with increased-capacity wireless services, faster corporate backbones with less software bottlenecks, and increased range of devices.

The savings for organisations are obvious: less expensive hardware, no need for corporate SOE "upgrades", no need for telephones, large screen projectors, lecture theatres and so on. Deakin University (my alma mater) is making this happen right now.

Interest in BYO technologies is growing fast, and this year at the University of Canberra we have been trialling  the use of BYO computer labs in my first-year undergrad unit. Following an upgrade to the network backbone over the last 12 months, things are all going swimmingly.

Ever since returning from Jordan, where I relied on Google translate to have half a clue what was going on around me in Arabic, I have taught all of my classes in computer labs. This has given my students immediate access to information. 

Don't understand something in English? Use Google translate, understand the word, now let's discover the concept. Don't know which war I am talking about when I say the post-war golden age? Look it up on the Net then straight back into the tutorial discussion.

Remember the "no looking at draft essays" policy? All gone - simply look at it online in the classroom. Until you have taught a non-tech uni subject with several hundred students in a tech environment, you haven't lived.

So when I hear about schools investing in one particular device, I shake my head in disbelief. But it is much easier when you can supplement your investment with government funding: West Moreton Anglican College recently purchased 640 iPads for year 7-12 students at a cost of $480,000 using government funding.

Governments can't pick winners, so what makes schools any different?

Good marketing, it seems. Apple, through its devoted evangelistic followers, even has a uni domain name: auc.edu.au. 

In the 1990s, while working as an accountant, the number of clients who purchased an Apple computer to do their own book-keeping would say to me: "The kids use Apple at school, so they must be easy to use". Even today I can't use simple things like flash video on my iPad, so you can imagine how upset my clients were when their work was not compatible with our Microsoft systems.

The short-term investment in iPads is not new -the University of Adelaide did this nearly two years ago. But this isn't anywhere near BYO technology.

For me, BYO technology is all about access to the Internet and the local network at super-fast speeds. Here at the University of Canberra we have been blessed with an IT team that is second to none and my trials are working out just fine.

But what bothers me is that the Digital Education Revolution is falling victim to some very good marketing from the key device manufacturers. I have argued elsewhere that Australian policy-makers focus too much on the device and not enough on the capability:

The Digital Education Revolution (DER) aims to contribute sustainable and meaningful change to teaching and learning in Australian schools that will prepare students for further education, training and to live and work in a digital world. 

If the DER is to move to sustainability, then buying a bunch of iPads for students is a clear waste of taxpayers money. I just hope that management at West Moreton Anglican College were savvy enough to purchase the iPad three so students enjoy the prime time of their new devices.

But in the meantime, there are the institutional arrangements, and, more importantly in an educational environment, the equity issues. Instead of buying a handful of iPads, why isn't the DER providing cheap loans to students to purchase their own devices? 

The "digital world" our students will inhabit will be a BYO technology world - taking away students' ability to choose for themselves is a bureaucrat's dream of the most "efficient and effective"single solution. The approach is misguided: there are multiple solutions and we all use modern communications technologies differently. 

If the digital education revolution is to be truly revolutionary, then we need to get away from good marketing and go back to basics: user choice. BYO technology will enable the DER, but bureaucrats need to stop looking at the marketing and start talking to the people who are actually in the trenches of the digital revolution.