Day 2 of Broadband & Beyond 2011 kicked off with a keynote address from Mike Quigley, the chief executive of Australia’s National Broadband Network company, NBN Co.

the NBN Co has received around 75 pehttps://wp10880.wpquasar.dev/wp-admin/post.php?post=74&action=edit&message=6rcent consent to connect in its early release sites, in line with targets, with Willunga in South Australian reaching 91 percent for a network that is being deployed entirely underground. In Brunswick in inner city Melbourne consent sits at just 50 percent, although Quigley attributed the low take-up to the high proportion of rental properties in that suburb. That figure will jump quickly should a deal with Telstra be consummated as its copper network will be retired in favour of NBN Co’s fibre. Whether the deployment will go overground or under will depend greatly on individual circumstances – underground is great in areas of high winds, but not so good in flood plains.

Quigley also took time to once again try to settle the debate over whether fixed-line broadband is better than mobile, citing the usual arguments regarding the fact that wireless connections are shared and degrade over distance. He also called on examples from around the world, including statements from the CEO of AT&T, Randall Stephenson.

“There are going to be applications coming that are going to be difficult for even the latest mobile technologies to deal with,” Quigley said. “(Mobile and wireless) are both complementary. They have advantages and disadvantages. If you want to stream lots of video it is going to be difficult over wireless networks.  Every big telco is working hard to try and get data off a mobile network and onto a fixed network.”

He also discussed the business case, which will deliver a 7 percent return without any analysis of social or business benefits. He also pointed to a report from Huawei that talked about how people are more compelled to live in rural areas if there is good broadband.

The first session back after lunch focused on companies that have already been building successful broadband-based businesses. The first speaker was Tom Kennedy, the executive director of group digital services at Omnilab Media, who talked about his company’s success in international media production, and its services business, which delivers media to dozens of different media companies and distribution platforms. In terms of revenue, he talked about how revenue from advertising is in decline, while subscription services are likely to rise and transactional models are getting stronger.

“If you give people the model where people can get to content fast, efficiently, and in a time when they want to get to it, they will pay for it,” Kennedy said.

And while content is king, Kennedy said distribution was King Kong, in terms of the value that came from getting content out to as many different distribution platforms as possible. He also talked about the difficulty today in delivering content with quality – something that requires more investment in networks.

The ABC’s head of strategic development Abigail Thomas, who talked about what it means when people have access to synchronous networks and what they mean for media applications, especially when everyone has access to them. She ran through a demonstration of its use of the Ushahidi services, which asks citizens to report in during emergency situations to allow people either on the ground or elsewhere to pinpoint where help is needed. It has been used in situations such as the Haiti earthquake, but also for the Pope’s visit to the UK. The ABC used it to ask citizens to provide information about feral animals around Australia, and again in a more serious way for the Queensland floods, where it was viewed by 200,000 people. It was the second biggest deployment after Haiti.

Thomas also described how an application like Ushahidi could looking in a broadband-enabled world, with more people more comfortable with the technology and contributing to crowdsource initiatives, and doing so in a richer way.

“The synchronous nature of the NBN has the potential to connect us into many national conversations,” Thomas says.

The third speaker for the session was Rachel Dixon, the chief operating officer at Viocorp. She described there being three things that you need to do anything online – content, infrastructure and salaries. She said that the old trend of online video being confined to short-form content is being turned around, with the big growth now in long-form content and IPTV.

The final session before lunch focused on remote and rural communities, and was led by a presentation from CSIRO ICT Centre’s director Ian Oppermann, who talked about a range of initiatives that CSIRO has made in delivering broadband access and services to regional areas. He talked about two projects, including one that performs remote ophthalmological testing, and about CSIRO’s partnership with NICTA in the Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation.

The second speaker was Rosalind Dubs, chair of the Space Industry Innovation Council who talked about the importance of space technologies to Australian society today, such as weather forecasting, the timing of banking transaction, television broadcasting, and of course, the GPS network. She discussed the role that the National Broadband Network will play in providing the terrestrial data network for moving satellite data around, especially in regional areas.

The final speaker was Rangan Srikhanta, executive director of One Laptop Per Child Australia. He talked about the importance of equipping remote communities with skills and equipment to participate in the digital econom.

“We need to consider all the moving parts to make a solution stick,” he said.

First up in the third session was Ben Hamilton, head of corporate strategy and communications at Country Energy. He talked about how electricity networks are getting faster as they are overlaid with a telecommunications layer, and how ever point in his company’s value change is changing as a result of the data that now moves through it. The concept of giving customers access to information has already been proven to change their behaviour, but requires home-area networking and smart meters. Customers will switch their load when they know the best times to buy electricity.

“We are on the cusp of a huge change, but we can ony plan for the known knowns at the moment,” Hamilton said.

Next up was Paul King, smart grid industry consultant at Logica, who spoke about the change of the role of the consumer in the energy ecosystem, the role of data in driving that change, and the emergence of specialist business models in the energy industry. While energy consumption has been passive, we are moving towards being able to be informed consumers, with consumer intimacy being a key to achieving a better energy future. He also cited the example of UK-based Tesco, which went from being a retail grocery company to becoming an energy retail company selling solar installation, gas, electricity and heat pumps.

“If was an enegy rtailer in Australia I would be very scared of this trend,” King said, adding that new entrants were not hindered by legacy customer management systems.

The third speaker was George Margelis, general manager of Care Innovations (who is also quoted in A Faster Future), who talked about the limiting factor in the growth of communities being access to services.  He talked about how healthcare is all about communication, and that where people want their healthcare to be delivered is very different to where it is delivered today.

“What they want is services delivered in their communities, in their homes,” Margelis said. What we need is a model of care that is connected, where patients work with their care team, and that is flexible and can be delivered remotely out to where the patient is.

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!