The second session at Broadband & Beyond 2011 kicked off with a presentation from John Wadeson, deputy secretary for ICT infrastructure at the Department of Human Services, who talked about the extremes his department had to go to in order to keep services running through the recent Queensland flood crisis. He also talked about the need to be able to deliver services in any place, any time. He also showed a graph that shows how the number of people logged in to services in any given year have more than doubled in a year.

“If you’re not there when the citizen really years you, you’re not there at all,” Wadeson said. “We have always been on the limit of what the infrastructure can do. My view around broadband, and why we need these things, is that it will facilitate. We need to run big complex applications wherever people are, because that is the nature of government.”

The second speaker was Michael Georgeff, chief executive officer from Precedence Healthcare. Georgeff talked about how the NBN may impact healthcare, with a key message that broadband is a rare opportunity to really transform healthcare, but will require a lot more than the healthcare. He talked about how healthcare is really a knowledge enterprise, and many of the negative outcomes are a failure of knowledge.

He also talked about the huge strain that chronic illness places on the medical system, due to its need for long-term planned care involving an care team – with a huge amount of communication (it’s another theme picked up in the healthcare chapter of A Faster Future). Only three percent of patients in Australia are currently receiving best-practice care. Michael has been involved in the development of cdmNet, a collaborative Web-based service for managing the entire life-cycle of chronic disease. It’s about much more than sharing data.

“Using high-speed broadband we can deliver all of this at the point of care,” Georgeff said.

The third speaker was Paddy Nixon, the pro-vice chancellor at the University of Tasmania. He talked about the business opportunity for the university to utilise broadband to improve its offering. He said universities needed to think about a global business model, and one that competed with new learning tools such as Brain Trainer on the Nintendo DS.

And they must also think in terms of  life-long learning, rather than focusing just on highschool leavers. Nixon said that universities were the ideal hosts of life long learning profilies and would be the organisations that assured the awarding of titles. Content is king, but context is key, and learning needs to be componentised and available in an open marketplace and be time-independent.

Am sitting in the audience at Broadband & Beyond 2011, the annual Communications Alliance industry conference. As you can imagine, much of the discussion is centred on the National Broadband Network, and what i can be used for – which is pleasing, as the usage of high-speed broadband networks is a big part of what is covered in my new book, A Faster Future.

The opening keynote was delivered by KPMG partner for the digital economy Malcolm Alder, who spoke about the challenges that will be faced by the retail sector as we move to the NBN. Malcolm covered a huge amount of territory in a short period of time, from healthcare for the elderly to the future of utilities. He also talked about the possibility for service providers to aggregate other services and sell them through their portal. It may be possible that a telco no only sells access, but possibly electricity and healthcare.

Malcolm was followed by Shara Evans, chief executive officer of research firm Market Clarity, who spoke about the current penetration of broadband and gave some predictions on its future take-up. The general theme was that access will continue to faster and cheaper.

Hello everyone. Apologies for the long absence from the blogosphere, but much of the last six months have been taken up in co-writing a new book, A Faster Future, which explores the future evolution of broadband applications and services and the impact they will have on business, society and individuals. The good news is that A Faster Future will be available on February 24, and while much of my work this year will be based around that book and topics related to broadband services, I can also get back to writing more broadly once more. There’s also quite a lot that happened in the last six months that I need to catch up on …. All the best, and welcome back!