ACMA study augers well for NBN uptake

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 06 December 2011 12:16

Business IT - Networking

The ACMA is predicting a new wave of innovative, interactive applications and services, driven by the availability of 'next generation networks'. While high bandwidth is not necessarily a feature of an NGN, nor of the expected applications, realisation of the ACMA's forecast will inevitably lead to increased demand for bandwidth.

The ACMA's forecasts are contained in its latest report 'Developments in next generation applications and services' the fourth in a series examining the pressures of technology changes and developments on current regulatory arrangements.

According to ACMA chairman, Chris Chapman, "Next generation networks effectively remove legacy carriage technology barriers to provide a broad foundation for the development of applications and services in a converging industry. High speed broadband technologies are underpinning the development of 'always-on' and readily accessible applications."

The ACMA uses the term NGN to describe a suite of technology developments that are occurring in core and access network architectures. The report focuses on the NGN attributes of connectivity (always-on communications); collaboration (sharing and centralising resources and capabilities) and distributive networking (aggregation of disparate resources and capabilities)."

According to the ACMA, "The always-on nature of connectivity-based applications has provided the catalyst for developments in e-health, e-education and teleworking'¦As these applications are now less likely to be restricted to any particular device category or operating platform, this in turn encourages their wider adoption by providing individuals with more flexible ways to communicate and collaborate with one another.

"NGNs are also creating better ways for distributed computing applications to be adopted as high speed connectivity to numerous disparate computing and data resources is becoming easier in a converged networked environment. [And] end-user devices and applications are becoming increasingly intelligent with programmability and remote configuration options that can lead to reduced user involvement with underlying service operations."

The report highlights the challenges for regulation in provisioning next generation access technologies in a converged communications environment, including fragmentation between service components across service providers, service initiation agreements and the techniques used to deliver services across a next generation access environment.

According to the ACMA, "The regulatory issues identified in this report are consistent with those raised in the ACMA's recent research paper 'Broken Concepts: The Australian communications legislative landscape' that examines how the process of convergence has systematically broken, or significantly strained, many of the legislative concepts that form the building blocks of current communications and media regulation."