Australia struggles to innovate. I know this is not caused by a lack of ideas or a lack of vision because I live in a world of Australian entrepreneurs. Indeed, what this community gets done, against all odds, is extraordinary.
The National Broadband Network in Australia is an opportunity to throw the genius, energy and passion of the Australian innovation community at a context for changing the world. I think it is a once-in-a-century chance for Australia to build, and then refine with real customers, next generation internet products that will compete on a world stage. We can’t imagine what new, multi-billion dollar companies are going to emerge from the this platform for innovation.
So let’s get started! Let’s show the world what we can do! Let me get my hands on a population with 100 MBps connectivity.
Well, so far, its all been rather under-whelming. Lot’s a of politics (thank you Telstra), lot’s of bureaucracy and a big focus on the hardware. There is practically no company, large or small, (that I have spoken to) that is exploring what it is going to do with this network.
Now look what’s happening. The US is coming, with Google at the helm, doing what we should be doing.
Official Google Blog: Think big with a gig: Our experimental fiber network.
Below are three things that Google is focussed on. Here’s what I want to know. Who has even identified these issues in Australia, let alone started work on exploring them?
- Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.
- New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.
- Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.
Oh, and Google is trialling connection speeds 10 times faster than the ones NBN is still making policy on.
If you know of some cool stuff going on in Australia around the NBN that will cheer me up, please let me know. In the meantime, I’ll initiate my 5 year plan to leave the country and go to live somewhere that I can stretch my legs.
Exciting and frustrating. What can be done simply to address this problem? Seems to be a problem of approach rather than amount of funding.
@CraigThomler Do we know how the libs would do it differently?
@snaglepus That’s why the Google initiative in the US is so exciting. A business jumping on the back of a government initiative to catalyse real innovation. There is no company like that in Australia though… I think the government will need to player a bigger role here… unfortunately.
I guess Telstra or Optus could do something? Opportunity for them to break out of being an infrastructure provider for the Australian community and get a piece of a massive global opportunity?
@metarand @rogerkermode What do ou make of this? Any ideas for quick, real initiatives?
Nice post Phil. Wat do u think about a national wifi network?
I think the only place you’ll be able to test any of this in the short term is in the trial rollout zones in Northern Tasmania. Open a Pollenizer outpost in Launceston?
@trib Do we know of any projects or initiatives in Tasmania that will explore the essential ‘next generation apps’ part of the NBN?
Mike, I think lots of cool things can come from that but that is more about access than changing the world IMHO.
Maybe need to go to this:
AusInnovate – Australia’s leading forum driving ICT innovation and impact for the nation – is scheduled during CeBIT on Monday 24 May 2010.
How will an NBN-enabled world unlock opportunities for your company?
The national broadband network (NBN) has the potential to dramatically change the way we live, work and play – and thereby create new technology-driving opportunities.
At AusInnovate, private and public sector industry leaders will discuss emerging technologies that are enabling new business opportunities. Thought leaders include:
Dr. Sarah Muttitt, Singapore Ministry of Health, will outline multiple health applications over their NBN that will be in place during 2010;
David Gonski, Australian Public Figure and Businessman, will examine how new research is driving business outcomes and opportunities;
Prof. Hugh Durrant-Whyte, Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems, will focus on increasing productivity through ICT innovation;
and local leaders already focusing on areas of innovation that are opening up as a result of the NBN
AusInnovate is the platform for growth and development, catalysing better global commercial outcomes from Australia’s ICT innovation.
@metarand chiming in! Phil, I like your thinking and agree there is a huge opportunity for a number of plays that are built on top of the next gen web platform that is in the process of emerging in Australia. There are some smart folks who have already started laying the groundwork in this respect, but a lot more could be done.
Onwards and upwards!
Phil, great to see you raise this subject…and equally un-great to see that I am one of only a few participants in the conversation?? There is just so much apathy here around the NBN (and so many other issues mind you), that I think we may just miss the boat, and many people like me could be joining you in a shift O/S (although 5 years is too far away for me!). So, here’s my thinking…I think the responsibility lies with business (duh) to lead this thinking, and I believe it rests with the RIGHT businesses. But the responsibility of helping the right corporations lead this thinking rests with US. Entrepreneurs and influencers will do well to engage with bigger brands and help them to facilitate some cerebral jousting on the subject of a bigeer, faster interwebulator. I am thinking public forums, held at places like AMP, Macquarie Bank, BHP, Dell Australia, and organisations that can host/sponsor the thinking may be a good place to start? What does everyone else think…or is Google Australia going to lead some forums on this subject??
Thanks for the comment Luke. There has been some great debate on this but I have struggled to keep it all in Echo and most of it lives in Twitter. This is why it looks like I was talking to myself all morning when you look at the thread.
The problem with Google doing something here is that they are US focussed. I’d love it if they did, but I doubt they will. Why should they care about launching something out of Australia?
A few of us got together recently to speculate on what coul dbe done if we aggregated some of the diluted events we have in Australia to focus on this issue. Here are my notes: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dctnt457_45hmwrbndf
Thanks Phil…without looking at the notes…I am a fan of the WCBD (what could be done) approach. In other words, if a collective could focus on the 5-10 biggest issues or opportunities that exist right now, and how broader band might help address/take advantage of these situations, then share that is a more public forum, maybe some conversation will be had by the right people.
OK Phil I’ll take up the invitation to do a brain dump….. it’s a big one in 2 parts…
PART 1 of 2
First an opinion, I think it’s worth noting that The NBN, or more specifically NBN Co, will be heavily scrutinized early on. Quigley and Co are in a race to show progress and will be judged quickly on how they execute on the following
1) How many homes are passed?
2) How much did it cost? (And how much was Telstra paid)
The third criteria, which is what we’re interested in, is
3) What will people use it for?
Quigley and Co must deliver on 1) and 2) before the demand issue will come to the fore.
Some thoughts on NBN opportunities:
The NBN is about the last mile and providing choice. The NBN provides services up to layer 2 with Retail Service Providers (RSPs) providing layer 3 services and above. It’s from this design choice that the opportunities will flow. With RSPs afforded the choice of what layer 3 services to provide they are free to offer IPv4, IPv6, multi-cast (the NBN will provide some help here at layer 2 to make this possible), anycast, and jumbogram services.
This means that we will see the emergence of applications that will exploit the capabilities of these services.
IPv6 provides a whole heap of improvements over IPv4 that include larger address space, zeroconfiguration, and security. RSPs that offer IPv6 will not need NATs, this means that we can have HEAPS of wireless devices that can communicate directly with each other AND move between different parts of the network. Start thinking what it means when tablets like Apple iPad and Microsoft’s Surface are everywhere. There’s also no reason why everyone’s home based WLAN AP couldn’t be made available for public use. I think we’ll see federations of WLAN APs involving multiple providers emerge.
Multicast has been the next big thing for many years, I did my PhD in it back in the late 90’s. NBN’s PON architecture will be great for distributing highly popular content. Some care will need to be taken to ensure that people can source multicast efficiently as well as consume it. Expect to see the mass migration of anything broadcast on to the NBN in short order. Anyone holding a broadcast TV or radio license needs to understand this now since the value of these licenses will effectively be zero in less than 10 years time.
Jumbograms are designed for shipping really large amounts of data around. Normal ethernet packets are 1500 bytes in length jumbograms can be up to 64k long (I think). Datacentres are getting bigger, SAAS is taking off, Ultra HDTV, 3D, will be delivered via the net, all of these things rely on the ability to ship huge amounts of data between replication points. The existence of a population with access to real broadband and backbone that can efficiently really huge amounts of data around will make Australia an attractive place for people to not just try out new applications but to host them as well.
I think we’ll see some very interesting things happen in Australia with massive datacentres opening up near sources of cheap power (Tasmania anyone? What about solar powered facilities up north?) that will serve not only Australian populations but Asia as well. Australia’s first rate privacy laws will also make it attractive place to host from. The interesting thing is that we currently suffer high bandwidth prices as we download more data into Australia than we pump out. Large scale hosting here could change that very quickly.
Longer term, Australia has a great opportunity to outsource high-value services to the rest of the world. We’re a services based economy in a stable part of the world and enjoy a great lifestyle. I think we’ll see people move here for the quality of life and work globally with minimal travel.
So back to the original question…. quick, real initiatives? Real yes, quick no…. I think we’ll need at least 18months to 2years post the inevitable Telstra deal and a critical mass of homes passed before we’ll start to see substantive initiatives emerge.
PART 2 of 2
And one last closing shot…. some people question whether or not what’s been proposed will be future proof and we’ll need to upgrade the NBN. The short answer is only a little bit. Pulling the fiber is the expensive bit. Swapping units out of rack is relatively cheap. The architecture proposed will be able very upgradeable and allow for Gigabits/sec to be pumped in each home in the long run.
With AppleTV about to make available free to air networks over IP in the US, Australian TV networks should be building for the NBN right now.
I hadn’t thought about the opportunities for the ‘web of things’ (http://www.webofthings.com/) but, you are right, a certain platform with no NAT removes a major impediment to some of the more interesting applications of p2p.
The software development needs to be happening now.
Great post and interesting discussion. But I don’t know if “what innovative uses can we find for the bandwith” is the right way to approach the question — it might be putting the cart before the horse, or perhaps the species before the ecosystem. I think the most innovative products arising from the bandwidth will arise after the bandwidth is in situ.
It’s certainly possible to invent products for a world that doesn’t exist yet (I can think of examples from IBM, 3M) but that’s been done in an environment that keeps the innovation and commercialisation apart from each other — the researcher who discovers a new adhesive compound doesn’t have to be the guy who slaps it on a bit of yellow paper and thinks, “hey, this could be useful in an office!” There’s little time or revenue pressure, just pressure to publish research and file patent applications.
I don’t think the Australian authorities have the luxury, unfortunately. We’re in a funding and electoral polling-driven setting that requires short-term and interim decision-making. I think the best we can hope for is that the innovation happens after the bandwidth — puny though it will seem by then — is in place.
One thing is certain: nothing will go unutilized. It wasn’t that long ago we wondered what we’d ever do to fill a gigabyte hard drive. The history of technology clearly shows that capacity is consumed as fast as it is created.
If we do have the luxury of inventing innovative applications for higher bandwidth then I’d suggest that as technologists the best we can do is to exempt ourselves from the process. We all have minds to some extent fixed in the present cost-per-capacity parameters we must operate within commercially today. We unconsciously censor any innovative ideas because we must do that on behalf of our clients, employers and community every day.
We can still get the innovative ideas though — from kids, who have no idea of what’s possible and impossible, who have no constraints that might prevent them from imagining a robot that can transform itself into a car, or a cupboard that can transport us to an immersive other world with a lion for a deity.
Yup the development does need to happen now and it is happening in a lot of the top labs e.g: Berkley, Stanford, MIT, CMU, etc. The thing that needs to be managed is timing. I’ve seen far too many things arrive early and then fall flat. The NBN is slated to take 8 yrs to roll out. I think that the critical mass of consumers will start emerge in the next 18 months….
So by all means start now but don’t expect to get huge adoption for a while yet.
@bigyahu If we wait 8 years for the rollout to happen and then use the context of our daily commercial context to get jiggy with it, while Google is doing the kind of thing in this post, then we are in 20th place again…
A) Not sure being first = winning; and (B) as a nation we keep underestimating future broadband requirements because we lack imagination but because we lack the capital (or choose to spend it on other things. Been in a US public hospital lately?)
If our leaders lack the imagination and courage to stretch our broadband speeds to 1000x then they certainly don’t have the imagination and courage to back product concepts that we can’t demonstrate because we need the network built to demo it.
I wonder if the way to encourage them to be courages and make some big long-term bets is to start cutting them a break instead of subjecting every tiny decision they make to endless media criticism and polling analysis. How can we expect them to make a gut-feel decision worth bazillions when we keelhaul them for fucking-up a highly-researched 100 million decision?
That Conroy fella’s being driven by popular opinion straight to the Internet dark ages because he knows if he resists, the talk radio shock jocks will crucify his government with horror stories about online snuff porn and Nigerian bank scams. He’s not an idiot, he just doesn’t think he can afford to risk doing anything better.
@bigyahu – I think every I think everything you say is correct. Certainly being first isn’t the best. And Conroy lives in an imperfect world. But my concern is being missed.
Building an innovative nation with the benefit of a population with a fast connection needs to be thought through as an ecosystem not as a hardware solution. Only then will we be making products that people want globally (not copies) which come from us getting a chance to ‘feel’ the opportunity first . Not being first, but getting the chance to try early and then iterate.
This does not need to be expensive. There are things that can be done that are a fraction of the cost or the network itself that will make the network worth 10x its value when it is real.
And before all this, I am staggered that no-one is even thinking about this stuff. What are the big TV networks doing? How is Medicare thinking about this? How are we incentivising consumer device manufacturers to make devices internet ready? How does a TV manufacturer start thinking about putting APIs in their TVs that will be launched in AU in the next 18 months?
Then we get the imaginations flowing.
Thanks for the discussion 🙂
My ten seconds, 2cents worth is that the sequence is normally platform, some applications, user adoption, more applications chasing the new users with more innovation.
It’s hard for small teams to be innovative in advance. Google has the deep pockets.
I think that we have to both push very very very hard to get as much as we can there for when the platform arrives, and also be very very very patient.
I’m like a dog with a bone on this issue now. Agree it is platform gt; Some apps gt; User Adoption gt; More apps.
The missed opportunity I see here is that I don’t believe you need to be Google to get going on building platforms for this thing.
Off the top of my head…
– We can just talk about it and plan for it being here – again, no one is planning for this thing in the product space as far as I can see…
– Conferences can come together to focus effort
– ISPs and media companies can come together and start innovating for next generation media services for trialing in Australia
– NBN can make labs available, although so much of it can be tested on an intranet as the speeds are comparable
– NBN could start a developer network
– We can implement the kind of open access networks as Google is proposing
– Government can super incentivise through additions to Ramp;D tax credits and favourable conditions for investors in this space.
In Australia, we sit and wait for someone else to do it first and then wonder why there are no huge, global companies starting here.
I think I just found the topic for the next Silicon Beach CTO gathering 🙂
Can I get an intro to someone at NBN?