Rabid Reseller: Cost-benefit paralysis on the NBN

Yet another report about the NBN gets released, telling us why we can’t afford it. Or, more accurately, telling us why we can only afford a lame NBN right now, and how we can pay for it all over again when it’s proven to be lame. The only people happy about this are the troglodytes. And the dudes who sell network kit: they get to supply two NBNs.

The Cost Benefit Analysis sets out to prove that the original NBN specification is unnecessary because nobody needs to download porn any faster than they already can on ADSL2+. No argument. But that’s not what an NBN is for, and it never was. The whole debate has been dragged into the “what the battlers” need arena, and nobody is listening to the people who would actually use it. Both sides of politics are equally to blame.

For starters, several people far cleverer than me have already proven that the cost-savings in tele-medicine alone would pay for the NBN in its original form. High-priced medical specialists could provide diagnoses and assistance without leaving home, no doubt at the expense of airlines and hotels.

Ditto for high-priced legal-eagles. And high-priced MBAs.

And high-priced systems engineers, too.

Now that we’ve agreed the NBN can be funded by savings made on stuff we already know about, the sky is literally the limit for increased productivity in other areas that we know something about. Think about the small business users who could ditch their entire IT

headache and use cloud services for everything if there was a fast, reliable link to the cloud. Using the cloud would mean they could rent best-of-breed applications that are only available to mega companies right now.

The plain fact is that the NBN would mostly benefit SMEs. The big-end of town already has private NBN-like infrastructure. But SMEs can’t afford to dig up roads and install fibre links. Particularly in places that aren’t in capital cities. And in case nobody noticed, SMEs are still the planet’s majority employer and the planet’s majority growth sector. That’s where the missing jobs would come from, not from mega-companies getting more mega – they do that already without hiring extra staff.

Your SME wants to open a branch office? Find some space, buy some desks and some tablet PCs with large screens and keyboards attached, and connect to the NBN. All your smartphones operate as extensions to the head office virtual PBX. Problem solved. Setup time is about as long as it takes to carry in the furniture. And if the bold move opening the new branch fails to produce profits? Almost zero cost to close it down and move to the next suburb or town, and have another go.

And those are just some of the obvious benefits of always-on, high-speed internet connectivity. Nobody knows what else would pop up once the links are in place. Hardly anyone predicted the explosion in regional towns that was made possible because someone built a railway station nearby. We’ve already got the regional towns and outlying suburbs. We just need someone to build a 21st century network to link them to the rest of the world.

Can the next report on the NBN take a look at what it will cost the country if we don’t build it?

Gotta go! connection timeout