Why we need ultrafast broadband

Ben Kepes stirs the pot, questioning why we need fibre the home. It seems he’s happy with 1Mbit/s.

He questions the benefits of broadband, and references the MOTU report [compiled for the Ministry of Economic Development and subtitled "Need for speed: Impacts of Internet Connectivity on
Firm Productivity"] without referencing the considerable body of work done by the NZ Institute.

Both studies are flawed. The MOTU report tries to find productivity changes in companies who adopt broadband, but with a methodology that would fail to fond productivity improvements with the arrival of the PC. If they truly believe this then perhaps MOTU staff would like to ensure that their office and all of their homes are connected with dial-up.

Frankly I had thought the time for these sorts of arguments had long past – the MOTU report was back in 2009 and the Australian election, which was won on the commitment to the NBN (National Broadband Network) project, shows that most people understand. To hear someone like Ben, who is a cloud computing advocate, try to reason that 1 Mbit/s is enough for anyone was a bit shocking.

So here was my reply to his post.

From Grandma's dial-up to HD
Imagine a bell curve.

At one end is your ‘Grandma’, still on dial-up and perhaps just migrating to broadband now so that she can maintain a low resolution Skype chat with your children. Also on that end are families that cannot afford broadband connections, and so their kids are unable to properly join the online world. (Perhaps those kids are lucky, and are at somewhere like Pt England school where they give every kid a laptop for $15 per month and connect to the KAREN network to provide decent connectivity.)

At the other end of the bell curve are people that consume vast amounts of data at high speeds.

They might need it for media consumption (of increasingly high definition video), for work (I’m using Dropbox as I write this to transfer large files) or for Skyping their grandkids on high definition. Or perhaps they are creating a business that requires those services. Or perhaps it’s like the majority of Christchurch schools who want to get HD video connections so that students from one school can attend classes over video conferencing with teachers and students from another school, saving us money and increasing the knowledge of our kids. That’s happening right now, thanks to some tireless workers and the support of Enable’s fibre to the schools project.

Falling behind
But regardless of where we are on that curve, that entire bell curve moves each day, as the carriers deliver and we require higher and higher speeds, and as we increasingly accept always-on high speed internet as a requirement. 

Sadly NZ and Australia are well behind the rest of the developed world on this, while the definition of developed world itself expands as countries like South Korea invest in fibre (and other areas) and leapfrog their economy over ours.

The coming new normal
In the future it will be normal to have some of your kid’s classes conducted remotely at school or even to your home. Teaching material such as Khan academy will become the norm and for the video resolution of everything to be such that it’s ‘just like being there’.

It’s the same for work. Skype may work for start-ups, but for dealing with corporates we need high quality vide conferencing that is not only increasingly higher in resolution, but also never drops out and just works. That’s not Skype, and it’s incredibly expensive to deliver right now.

Sufficient today is insufficient tomorrow
It’s critical that we all understand that what’s sufficient today is insufficient tomorrow. Just as we all laugh now at Bill Gate’s assertion at 640 Kbytes should be enough for anybody, we in the technology and business communities also natively understand that in 5 or 10 years time 1 Mbit/s is going to be ludicrously slow. Imagine trying to load the homepage of Stuff (over 1Mbyte) on a 9.6 kpbs connection. Imagine trying to watch SHDTV emergency alerts about the latest ChCh earthquake over a 1 Mbit/s connection.

Fibre vs copper vs wireless
Fibre, copper and wireless are all bound by physical limits. Proponents of each show that the capacity that can be delivered over each keeps rising, and that’s true. 

However it’s also consistently true that fibre is the technology that can deliver the most capacity, and by quite a margin. It’s expensive to deploy, but once in the ground it’s relatively cheap to upgrade. Meanwhile in New Zealand the copper network to the home is most often ductless – and thus exposed to be corroded and difficult to maintain. There’s a place for wireless, be it networks generated in the home or business, or cellular networks that cover the populated country or, via satellite, an entire hemisphere.

The UFB and NBN programs are not abut 2011, nor even about 2015. They are long term focussed and are ensuring that the necessary infrastructure is in place. Copper just won’t cut it in 2020, but fibre will still be working and expanding in 2050 and beyond. Consider that the base case for Pacific Fibre is 2.56 Tbits/sec for a fibre pair on a 10000 km+ fibre leg, and we can see that the potential for the link from the exchange to the home is huge.

Consider also that what I regard as pretty conservative externally commissioned projections show Australasia running out of international capacity before 2020. A project like Pacific Fibre takes a long time to set up, and a long time to build, but like the NBN and UFB we’ll all be glad it is there in 2020.

Lance Wiggs is a director of PowerKiwi, supplying Flower Power, Tree Power and carbon neutralised Green Power to Powershop, an online electricity retailer; director of Texmate NZ, an Auckland based electronics OEM designer and manufacturer and producer of meters and mini-PLCs; and a director of Lingopal, a Perth based mobile translation venture capital funded start-up.

He is also a co-founder of Pacific Fibre, which aims to connect Australia and New Zealand to the USA with a very high capacity fiber, and an InternetNZ Councillor. He blogs at LanceWiggs.com.