A friend of mine in Sydney considers himself lucky – he only wastes five hours a week commuting to work. The average commute time for Sydney employees is 4.8 hours meaning the average person wastes 6.24 weeks a year sitting in a car listening to offensive radio shock jocks. Based on the median Sydney income of $66,200, the cost in lost productivity alone is $7,916 per annum. Furthermore, a whopping 27 percent of the average consumer’s annual emissions come from the car. One of the most obvious applications for the NBN is telecommuting. Think about it. Most Sydney employees sit in front of a computer and speak to people on the phone – they don’t need to be in a specific office to perform those tasks. People work in an office because that’s the way it’s always been done. We are still stuck with habits that were formed seventy or more years ago.
The NBN will have connection speeds up to 1Gbps with plans of 100Mbps commonly available. Many offices are internally connected at 100Mbps so the speed of a connection for a telecommuter could be the same as in the office, meaning you can sit at home with your computer and phone (and a camera if you so desire) and work as if you were at the office. If you prefer to see the person you’re speaking with you can initiate a video call, or schedule one day a week in the office.
When people can connect to the office from home they can turn commute time into productive time while easing road congestion and reducing carbon emissions. If Sydneysiders don’t need to travel to work each day, they could move to Dubbo – provided we have the NBN. What they can do from home in Sydney they could do from home in Dubbo. Once Sydneysiders realise the median house price in Sydney is $634,300 compared to $225,000 in Dubbo, they will be fighting with their employers to allow them to telecommute from Dubbo.
That is not all, of course.
Access to health professionals is a major problem in regional areas. Countless Dubbo people travel to Sydney to see a specialist who only needs five minutes with them – a day can be lost for a few minutes. The NBN world won’t allow a surgeon to sit at home and manipulate a scalpel remotely (or maybe it will as technology progresses) but it will allow a specialist to check on a patient from a remote location using live remote video and diagnostic tools.
I remember my HSC years at Dubbo South High School (yes I can remember back that far); I wanted to study 4U maths but only the Humphrys twins and myself wanted to learn about the square root of a negative number. Only through the extreme generosity of our maths teacher were we able to come to school before and after normal classes and study the exciting curriculum. In an NBN world, virtual classes would connect with students from across Australia. Just like a real classroom, you could see your fellow classmates and have live two-way communications with them – you just wouldn’t be able to throw a paper plane at the teacher!
In an NBN world, Dubbo businesses have the potential to compete on the world stage. Why limit ourselves to 41,211 people when we could market our goods and services to six billion people across the world? With the NBN, location wouldn’t be an issue; businesses could locate servers and infrastructure in Dubbo and base their entire administration centres here. At the moment only 27 percent of businesses take orders via the Internet despite 42 percent having a Web presence. These numbers will surely increase.
We’re all conscious of reducing our electricity usage. I have a home with full home automation and can electronically monitor peak and off-peak usage and electricity production. The NBN will allow even greater access to remote home automation, leading to greater opportunities to reduce our electricity usage. You can’t change what you can’t measure, and I can see a new industry in remote electricity monitoring. Phantom power alone accounts for 15 percent of the average household electricity usage so there is huge potential here.
The NBN will change forever the way we watch TV. Our grandkids will laugh when they hear we had to turn on the TV at a certain time to watch a show that was broadcast when a TV executive deemed appropriate. Internet TV will allow you to watch what you want, when you want, where you want.
The NBN is being offered in three forms: fibre optic, fixed wireless (this is point to point wireless not to be confused with wireless to a mobile device), and satellite. Quoted satellite speeds can be very misleading. A geostationary satellite sits at a height of 35,786km above the earth. They haven’t yet proven Einstein wrong so the speed of light is the maximum speed at which we can communicate. At this height, there is a minimum latency of 477ms plus the normal latency inherent in the Internet. No amount of promises of ‘faster satellites’ will solve this latency issue. This is particularly bad for latency-sensitive applications such as voice or video but is still frustrating when just browsing the Internet. The only solution would be to utilise low earth orbit satellites – such as the 66 satellites that the Iridium phone system uses which orbit at 781km. This would only introduce additional latency of 0.01ms but at a huge cost with so many satellites required.
Already we are seeing some fantastic pricing from Internet Service Providers in NBN enabled locations. Some Dubbo businesses currently pay $750/month for a 4Mbps/4Mbps connection whereas a 25Mbps/5Mbps connection in an NBN area would cost $55/month. For only $70/month you could have a 100Mbps/40Mbps connection – that’s 10 times the upload speed for a 91 percent reduction in cost.
In 2002, Donald Rumsfeld stated “there are unknown unknowns – the [things] we don’t know we don’t know.”
In terms of the NBN, I believe this is the case. I can envisage some of the benefits the NBN will deliver to Dubbo and regional areas, but I don’t believe anyone can fully predict all of the opportunities. There are bound to be some applications we haven’t even begun to think of and opportunities that will only become obvious once the NBN is connected. Technology moves incredibly fast. Think about the latest fashion accessory – smartphones. The first iPhone was released on 29 June 2007. Apple has now sold more than 146 million units and 500,000 apps have been created. A few years ago we didn’t know we needed the device or any of the apps! The same will be true of the NBN. Soon after we‘re connected, we will be using the NBN in ways we didn’t know were even possible – and wondering how we lived without it.
The message we have received from Stephen Conroy’s office is that we made an excellent submission (the first of 400 submissions received) and we are as ready as any location for the NBN. The message from NBN Co. is the new algorithm that is being used as part of the rollout highlights Dubbo in a very positive light; we now just need to keep the pressure on and hope for a connection as soon as possible.
Tell me how you think you will use the NBN at mayor@dubbo.nsw.gov.au
Clr Mathew Dickerson, Mayor of Dubbo