IIA calls for widespread 10Mbps broadband by 2010

Stuart Corner
Monday, 31 July 2006 13:45

IT Industry - Strategy

The Internet Industry Assocation (IIA) has released a set of "aspirational goals" for Australia' broadband services calling for 80 percent of the population to have access to a service delivering at least 10Mbps downstream by 2010.
The same percentage should have access to upstream services of at least 1Mbps. "Upstream ratios are expected to remain relatively static for low end users, but progress towards full symmetrical services for businesses and high end users," IIA says.

For mobile broadband services the IIA's targets are 80 percent to have access to at least 500kbps downstream and about 128bps upstream.

The IIA' National Broadband Target makes to pretence of giving any indication as to how these goals are to be achieved, but is intended to be "a discussion piece, a first step, to stimulate further debate on achieving adequate broadband infrastructure and services for the medium term."

However it predicts that "Public expenditure will be necessary to future proof the Australian economy by investing in high capacity information infrastructure, particularly in areas of market failure, that is, areas that are uneconomic or cannot support competition."

The IIA's targets have been set based on comparisons of broadband availability towards 2010 in other countries, complemented by an examination of Australia's current status, and the deployment of broadband infrastructure in place, in build, in plan and in prospect. The IIA observes that by far the greatest demand on bandwidth will come from video, with HDTV being the most intensive.

The four year time frame was chosen as being "near enough that we can take account of existing and developing technologies that are likely to deliver Australia's broadband needs, and also to assess where we think other countries will be [and] far enough away to allow some degree of planning for what we hope will be a coherent, nation-building approach to provisioning Australians with high speed, high capacity internet."

The IIA's analysis is based on a number of emerging uses progressively become mainstream in other advanced information economies by 2010, or not far beyond, including: internet telephony with high function advanced features; high definition videophones; effective telecommuting; remote diagnosis and telehealth services; interactive remote education; rich multimedia entertainment; digitally controlled home appliances; broadband enabled motor vehicles.

ABS data shows capacity requirements are doubling every 12 months, and extrapolating this IIA says: "We project that the average user will consume some 76 Gbytes of data per quarter by 2010. This is based on an assumption that emerging voice, video and data services combined with software as a service, interactive gaming and other rich media applications will continue to be developed in tandem with increasing availability of bandwidth.

"Downloads of video and streamed IPTV are expected to assume greater public usage as the interactivity and convenience they provide becomes more apparent. Some commentators consider that once HDTV services are available, the appetite from users will soon soak up what we would consider today to be massive amounts of bandwidth."

The IIA's National Broadband Targets can be downloaded from here.