CIOs rally for NBN, rail against rollback

Beverley Head
Thursday, 05 August 2010 16:17

Business IT - Networking

Chief information officers in a range of different sectors have strongly backed the continued rollout of the national broadband network whoever wins the election - believing it is necessary for Australia's continued international competitiveness. However CIOs' progress in terms of planning for the additional reach and speeds that are being promised by the NBN remains very patchy.

None of CIOs interviewed by iTWire was in favour of the Coalition's plans to scrap the NBN, although few believed the current model was flawless. One CIO who requested anonymity said; 'If we took this attitude in the past then we wouldn't have any railways.'

Mortgage Choice's CIO Neil Rose-Innes, who manages the IT and communications network for the company and its 350 independent franchisees warns that if the Coalition stops the NBN; 'Unless they have a stated alternative it will stifle the growth in our economy. The alternative is dire without a meaningful alternative.

'I have trouble understanding how any government would not give us what business needs. I really struggle to see how any government of the day could stop investing in something so important to the country.'

Any moves to abandon the NBN would represent a 'retrograde step,' agreed Deloitte CIO Tim Fleming and place Australia at a 'big competitive disadvantage without it.'

Internally many large enterprises are expecting advantages for their own IT operations. Some CIOs are already anticipating that the speed and reach of the NBN will take some of the friction out of their operations and make them more efficient, and also allow better interaction with their customers. Some see it as a natural foundation for more cloud style computing services for both their own organisation and their customers. 

To date a good deal of the public debate surrounding the NBN has swirled around the access deal negotiated with Telstra, and whether the nation really needs to invest $43 billion in order to allow faster video downloads. But CIOs stress that the applications the NBN will allow are much richer than simple entertainment video downloading - but they acknowledge that this class of application cannot be rolled out until is a national infrastructure to support them.

It's a build them and they will come game. That said few CIOs are actually building applications yet.

There are some exceptions. Universities for example are linked by AARNet which already delivers broadband speeds considerably faster than those promised by the NBN. Inter and intra university applications, which are data rich and often image intensive, give clues as to the future type of rich applications that commerce will be able to construct.

For Paul Sherlock, CIO of the University of South Australia and chair of the Council of Australian University Directors of IT, 'the research and education sector is, in terms of telecommunications, very much in advance of what business has and needs.'

Nevertheless he believes that 'In a broad sense it will be good for the country to have high speed access.' While acknowledging that at present it is not easy to see the sorts of killer applications that will emerge, he believes health and education will feature strongly.

The rollout of the NBN will also allow universities to start offering students access to richer e-learning applications. 'From a university perspective we are interested in students having access to affordable high bandwidth at home,' said Sherlock, allowing new models to be developed for the delivery of education. This will be particularly important he says as universities strive to comply with the recommendations of the Bradley review of higher education which called on universities to take on more students, especially those from lower socio economic levels.

Using the NBN to straddle the digital divide is also exercising the NSW Government which has been involved with an NBN testbed in South Sydney and is trialling applications that would allow improved service delivery if delivered over fast ubiquitous broadband.