NZ research questions the value of high speed broadband

Stuart Corner
Monday, 02 November 2009 11:38

Opinion and Analysis

He questioned the Government's spending of taxpayers' money on "backward-looking research into a fast-forward industry, measuring a past that no longer exists and extrapolating conclusions about the future, with little serious attempt to place this in real-world context."

While the report has been prepared by eminent economists and no doubt using rigorous economic methodologies the age of the key data in this fast moving industry and the magnitude of the caveats seem to me to make the core finding highly questionable.

Perhaps there would have been a better way. Last month Verizon and Cisco announced the results of a study commissioned from Frost and Sullivan designed to quantify the productivity gains achieved from deploying collaboration and unified communications tools.

The methodology was relatively simple: the survey sample was asked to rate their own organisation's performance over the last year, relative to other organisations in their industry, across key performance areas - overall customer satisfaction, sales and profit growth, labour productivity, and product and service innovation.

Surely something similar could be done to estimate the productivity gains, if any, from higher speed broadband services in New Zealand. A rigorously undertaken survey with a well designed questionnaire to gain real world feedback from New Zealand businesses today might have produced results rather different from Motu's.