Putting the NBN cart before the digital economy horse

Stuart Corner
Monday, 01 December 2008 05:59

Opinion and Analysis

Parakala called on the Government "to make the digital strategy a national priority" and to progress it in parallel with the NBN.  He noted that the ACS "[has] repeatedly stated this and been more vocal on this than any other organisation.

"The digital economy strategy of this country is heavily reliant on the NBN infrastructure investment and that strategy needs to be properly articulated and defined before this investment is fully leveraged....We need to have a very good idea what we want to do with this infrastructure."

However if  Conroy sticks to the timetable for the NBN it seems likely that the design of this will be largely finalised and the contract awarded by the time the 'digital future' issues paper is released, let alone progressed to a stage were response have been received and considered and some definite digital economy strategy formulated.

Conroy told the ABC's 'Inside Business' programme on 30 November that: "The expert panel has eight weeks. It will then make a recommendation to us towards the end of January. We will then, depending on what the recommendation is, hope to be signing a contract sometimes towards the end of March. That's our ambition. But that will depend to a degree on the recommendations that come forward. We would then want to start the build, obviously, as fast as we can."

Parakala believes that the need to build the NBN taking application and services issues into consideration and in line with an overarching digital strategycan be met within Conroy's timetable: if his government gives a sufficiently high priority to the Digital Economy strategy. Prakala predicted that, as the government gets to award the NBN contract it will be able to devote more energy and resources to leveraging how the infrastructure is going to be used.

"From our discussions with the Government, they clearly understand the need [to define the digital economy] and we believe they may embark on that journey next year."

Embark they may, but if the journey to the NBN progresses as fast as Conroy hopes, there seems little chance of the Digital Economy strategy keeping pace.