Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 30 May 2007 13:21
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
So far as I am aware there have been few serious, public, attempts in Australia to quantity the economic benefits of broadband and the commercial justification from an investor's perspective.
One
detailed study was undertaken by the Allen Consulting Group for Ericsson in late 2003. It focused on the potential impact of rolling out a symmetric data service offering speeds greater than 10Mbps to provide a multi-user environment and multi-device applications in SE Queensland.
The cost-benefit calculation is based on an investment over seven years of $850 million put into the backbone, other facilities and, importantly, into fibre to the home, and it assumed that coverage reached 50 percent of households and businesses. It concluded that, if the rollout were undertaken by a "neutral carrier", one that allowed for open access to resellers, it would give a net boost, in current money terms, of $3.16 billion.
However one of the assumptions was that the area would gain competitive advantage over others less well served. In a nationwide rollout that would not be the case.
Overseas there seems to be an equal dearth of certainty. In the UK the Broadband Stakeholders Group - a body with very wide representation and the resources to commission serious research seems to be no better able to come up with a convincing argument for investment in next generation broadband access.
In the middle of last year it
published a report commissioned from Analysys: "Predicting UK future residential broadband requirements." A key assumption was "the unconstrained availability of bandwidth at affordable cost."
