Our friends at Digital Education Research Network (DERN) alerted me to an interesting review of Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) which is largest capital project ever undertaken by the Australian government. The NBN is a 43 billion dollar, 8 year project begun in 2010 which “will deliver high-speed broadband to all Australians” through provision of a wholesale connectivity to thousands of Internet providers throughout the country. They have an ambitious goal of providing fibre to the end user for 93% of users.
The Australian’s were seeing their connectivity continue to lag behind other developed countries – in terms of connectivity, use and end-user costs. The OECD (2010) rated Australia 18th most connected country (23.4% of citizens compared to the Netherlands as most connected with 36% of citizens using broadband and Canada in 12th place with 30%.
Of recent interest is the establishment of a parliamentary committee to investigate the role and potential of the NBN. The terms of the committee are both interesting and very broad. They empower the committee to investigate the current and potential value of broadband networking to education, health and other services.Read More