IT WAS unfortunate timing as much as anything, that about five or six years ago – when CSIRO finished developing an internet solution for regional Australia using the existing analog television broadcasting network – that the starter’s gun was fired and people needed it immediately.
The CSIRO’s Peter Carter told Armidale’s The Next Crop Q&A forum the conversation had now shifted to how to provide those services to remote areas of India at very low cost.
Australia, because of a comparatively low population and in turn potential profits for providers, had been somewhat left behind.
But the technology – known as Ngara – is still there and “it’s likely as we reach the boundaries of cost effectiveness of some of the NBN solutions, we will find (companies) reaching out for alternative solutions to address the more challenging problems they’re having to solve,” said Mr Carter.
The very remote, the hard to reach and the small populations scattered across inland Australia are always going to be a challenge to communications providers.
But he said the technology has been deployed effectively in North America and engineers are looking to adopt it in India.
The race for connectivity has reached breakneck speed.
“I’ve got three kids and we live in Sydney at the moment and we would typically consume – this is a 12-year-old, a 10-year-old and a nine-year old – they would call down 50 gigbabits a week, it far exceeds what we ever thought.
“We would now have nine or 10 devices in the house, and the importance of that in terms of them picking up school work and completing their homework, doing the research, is that so much of what we’re throwing at kids are cloud-based education tools,” he said.
He said connectivity was now so fundamentally important to creating an attractive environment to young families “that I would suggest there are many people making significant decisions about where they will live based on the available services”.
I would suggest there are many people making significant decisions about where they will live based on the available services.
- Peter Carter
He said regional Australia must make its voice heard, communities must mbilise to ensure critical infrastructure is in place.
“There is a huge inventory of capabilities the telecommunications companies have, and when pressure is applied will find a solution,” he said. “In many cases we’re seeing communities take action, they’re stepping up and they’re having a conversation with an operator with expertise in networks,” he said. “And they’re very quickly (establishing) networks that work very effictively in regional areas and towns – many regional communities are much, much smaller than your average business, in terms of the number of people connected at any time.
“And so we are seeing some really great models using off-the-shelf products and local expertise,” Mr Carter said.
“We are seeing really great companies just stepping into communities and saying ‘(with that existing) million-dollar, or two-million dollar communications tower, we can deliver an effective solution at a fraction of the cost (of the big providers).”
He said that step forwards was all about creating somewhere that is an attractive place to be. We also have an issue in the way people are producing and consuming information, for instance in our household everything is about downloading, but there are many businesses that are relying on the ability, at high speed, to upload information.”
He said a key to being an effective community and engaging with the outside world is the ability to upload at very high rates.
He said these facts meant connectivity was a fundamental requirement when it came to people making a decision about where they will live. He said a lot of the telecommunications companies and manufacturers had been working on the assumption that households are consumers of data.
“It’s important for business councils to be standing up and making clear there is a need to be producing and publishing, and his really applies to farmers as well.
“We’re seeing farms not only being animal, fibre and energy producers, but also data providers.
“And the future is all about making more and more of that data available.”