I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
The New Zealand Institute has just published a draft of their latest report.
Defining a broadband aspiration:
How much does broadband matter and what does New Zealand need (pdf)
As mentioned I’ve been involved with this and believe it is an important document for a number of reasons.
- It readily determines national economic benefits of over $2.7b annually
- For the first time that I’ve heard, it makes the point that high speed access - to connect New Zealand to the rest of the world from key locations - is more important than broad penetration across the whole country.
- It points out there is a significant cost of inaction
Congratulations to the New Zealand Institute team on pulling this together and doing the heavy lifting required to move the debate forward.
My own thoughts have evolved publishing my paper ‘Securing our Digital Trade Routes‘ in February. My purpose was to start a discussion on whether there was a business case for the people of NZ owning the base infrastructure - because no company could build a business case to do it.
As I’ve learned more and listened to the debate, my position has evolved to break the argument into two steps.
- I believe that Infrastructure investment is a completely different business model to retail telecommunications services. Ideally the market itself would separate. Infrastructure investment should provide a safe and low yielding return - this type of investment product is even more so in demand as the ‘flight to quality’ occurs following the fallout of the finance companies. Retail telecommunications suit share market funding where companies can quickly raise funds and compete with innovative services and marketing. I truly believe that everyone wins under this separation, especially the existing carriers.
- Once separated, the decision of whether the state should invest at the infrastructure level becomes less emotional. I believe they should invest for a number of reasons.
- It is a good safe investment
- There is a lack of significant sized local investments they could make with the significant kiwi saver money that is accumulating
- A broadband infrastructure investment has substantial national economic benefits in addition to the return on capital
- It can drive the Internet in New Zealand to a cost plus, rather than revenue maximizing, model
The timing of this report is excellent considering the upcoming Digital Strategy 2.0 conference in late November.
David Cunliffe has a press conference at 9:00 on separation. Be interesting to see which way it will go.
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“2 For the first time that I’ve heard, it makes the point that high speed access - to connect New Zealand to the rest of the world from key locations - is more important than broad penetration across the whole country.”
Well, it is a very similar issue to the peering one raised with David Cunliffe in February but also very valid.
Re Point 2: Exactly! This is a huge point.
This is the point of measuring the performance of broadband services in the way that we do; we are often asked, given we “only” have measurement sites in the largest cities in the country how do we achieve “representativeness” in terms of a fair picture of performance across the entire country.
My response is always twofold; 1: with the exception of employees of a company sitting in the same room, literally every user sits behind a unique combination of mitigating factors (copper quality / length / no. of other users on DSLAM, their profile of relative distances from DSLAM, usage profile of those users etc etc);
2: There are places in the country which are more important than others. These may not always be major cities, or even cities, but if we identify these specific sites, and then measure broadband service performance at those sites, we can more easily quantify the cost/benefit of the service quality levels at those sites.
So if we have industry/incubator sites A, B and C, and C is receiving a BB service level an order of magnitude less than A and B, it can be addressed. And if C has considerable potential to grow exports, the govt has an interest in making sure the infrastructure available to C is up to scratch. And we can then regularly monitor to see if indeed service levels are improving, and which ISP is providing the best service in that location.
Don’s point is interesting viz Peering points, but is it more interesting if we can measure performance at important sites of economic activity and compare those nationally? I reckon.