Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The New Zealand Institute has come out strongly lobbying for a national fibre to the home rollout saying it has identified national economic benefits from broadband in the range of $NZ2.7-$NZ4.4 billion per year with further upside potential possible.
It calls for a shift in policy from encouraging broadband penetration to increasing the speed of the network, saying this means investing in a fibre network. "There is a significant cost to waiting...The longer that New Zealand waits, the more economic value it will forego and so New Zealand should approach the investment in fibre with urgency...Each year of inaction leads to lost benefits: a five year delay will cost New Zealand about $NZ16 billion."
New Zealand's current Digital Strategy calls for at least 90 percent of the population to have at least 5Mbps by 2010. The Institute wants this goal to shift to rolling out fibre to 75 percent of the population by 2018, saying "This investment in fibre must commence with urgency. The aim should be to front-load the investments so as to capture economic value quickly."
The Institute has started a two-part project to develop a broadband strategy for New Zealand. Its first stage is to define a national aspiration for broadband. The next stage will focus on defining a specific pathway to fibre. It has released, in draft form a document representing phase one of this strategy: "Defining a broadband aspiration: how much does broadband matter and what does New Zealand need", to stimulate discussion of the issues and to solicit feedback before releasing its final report.
In the draft the organisations says: "We aim to move beyond the assertion that broadband is good for the economy, and high-level estimates of the economic benefits, by providing a more detailed, bottom-up assessment of the economic value of high-speed broadband. We only examine the benefits of moving from current levels to high-speed broadband, rather than including the benefits generated by the current level of broadband speed. We have identified several classes of economic benefit, based on both the international evidence and an analysis of where we expect significant benefits to New Zealand.
It claims that its bottom-up estimates are in line with other studies into the economic benefits of fast broadband, both for Australia and those conducted for other countries."
David Bass
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