A broadband Australia tapping a market of 5 billion Internet users

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 02 June 2009 05:27

IT Industry - Strategy

Outgoing ICANN CEO, Paul Twomey, paints a picture of enormous opportunities for Australia as the NBN increases broadband speeds and as the global population of Internet users more than doubles in the space of two years to five billion, most of these in Asia.

"We have 1.5 billion Internet users now but by the end of 2010 or early 2011 we will have five billion. There will be five billion mobile handsets in the world. In India they are adding nine million handsets a month and nearly all of them will be Internet connected," he told iTWire. "We need to realise in business terms this is an enormous opportunity for Australia There are no trade barriers on the Internet...The opportunities for global commerce and trade are phenomenal."

Twomey described the Government's NBN announcement in April as "a galvanising event for us to really consider what it means to be a broadband connected community in the Western Pacific in the 21st century; in a globalised world where everything is connected."
He added: "We have to ask what are the globalisation opportunities, and in particular what are the content opportunities for the three cities in this country that speak all the languages of Asia Pacific."

He suggested that the NBN would require a complete rethinking, at a business level, what it means to run the services sector of the Australian economy. "How are PR firms, law firms, accountants going to run their businesses in the broadband environment. What sort of transitions are going to take place? The clarion call of the [NBN] announcement is that it is about re-engineering the economy."

While users take for granted the global interconnectedness and inter-operability of the Internet that opens up these huge opportunities for international trade and commerce, Twomey observed that things could easily have been very different.

"Most people don't think about the fact that the Internet is a single global inter-operable network. It never crosses their mind that when they click on a link on that screen they can see anywhere from Norway to New Zealand. And that it because Vint Cert and Bob Kahn [inventors of TCP/IP] did not put geography inside the TCP protocol: it does not recognise geographic boundaries. They could easily have done that."