What if we held an Australian broadband crisis and nobody came? That’s pretty much what happened in Australian broadband policy after 2012. Governments, forecasters and the media can all learn lessons from this episode.
Illustration: Fibre optic cable in a pit | Author: Bidgee on Wikimedia | Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia license
Twelve years ago the National Broadband Network (NBN) was at the cutting edge of Australian public policy concerns. The Coalition under Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull was preparing to cut short Kevin Rudd and Steven Conroy’s plan for a full fibre-to-the-premises broadband network. Over the years after Abbott’s 2013 election, the bulk of us would make do with not superfast broadband but plain old fast broadband of less than 100 megabits per second.
At the time, a lot of people were deeply, passionately concerned about the Coalition’s reluctance to complete the NBN. In 2013, a young and passionate ABC journalist, Nick Ross, wrote a 10,000-word article for the ABC insisting that cutting short the original NBN plan would sacrifice various economic gains and in particular cut short a “healthcare revolution“. Another ABC journalist Emma Alberici, suggested that healthcare robots and other telehealth advances such as high-definition videoconferencing, together with other demands such as education and computer gaming, would drive up demand for gigabit (1000-megabit-per-second) consumer connections by 2020 or earlier. (Alberici archly doubted Malcolm Turnbull’s claim that Australians were unlikely to need gigabit speeds anytime soon, concluding one article: “That’s what they said about the World Wide Web”.) Media commentators made invidious comparisons between broadband speeds in Australia and in countries like Romania. When in 2014 an inquiry (chaired by former Victorian Treasury head Mike Vertigan) found that the Coalition’s truncated NBN would not create a disaster, that decision was pilloried by various commentators, including people at places like Sydney University (as well as some here on Club Troppo).
And a decade or so on from this controversy … weirdly, pretty much nobody cares any more. Pretty much nobody claims that the shape of the NBN crippled Australia’s economic development or its tech sector or anything else. Pretty much nobody cares that our three-year-old Labor government has played it pretty quiet about the state of the NBN, rather than declaring it had to fix the Coalition’s mess. Pretty much no-one in the media writes impassioned demands to Fix The NBN. It is nearly impossible to find any economist or business thinker who worries that Australia’s broadband speeds are holding it back. Many of the media chroniclers of impending doom have moved on to other fields. Network traffic continues to be dominated by video entertainment, as it has been since the 1990s. Even amongst broadband network measurement firms like Ookla, attention has moved to mobile speeds.
And most of us have less than 100 megabits per second of fixed-line connectivity. But that indeed turns out to be mostly fine.
Why has all this Not Caring come about? Mostly because almost none of the cited benefits of superfast broadband has come to pass.
Five lessons
This experience can teach us at least five useful lessons.
- The first lesson is that projecting from technology improvement to productivity improvement is tough, because it takes more than a single technological improvement to change society. Productivity in most western countries in the age of superfast broadband has not exploded; in fact it has slowed to a walk – and pretty much no-one thinks connectivity is the culprit.
- Second, the micro-level specific benefits claimed for superfast broadband in areas such as education, health and power management were mostly overstated. For instance, COVID showed that telehealth, contrary to the pronouncements of some would-be visionaries, is mostly determined by the will and mindset of the health providers and the technology comfort level of doctors and patients. And far from needing superfast broadband, telehealth can often be done with just a voice connection.
- Third, many of the supposed benefits of superfast broadband were in fact realised with the broadband we already had in 2012. Personal communication continues to be dominated by low-bandwidth phone calls and SMS and social media. For many people, the most obvious result of a return to 2011 connectivity levels would be that their TVs might struggle with 4K streaming.
- Fourth, superfast broadband (that is, broadband above 100Mbps) has not, so far, been the solution to any of our our toughest problems, those intractable ones with complex social roots. For example, health IT experts still battle away trying to get the industry to digitise its existing workflows. I have a My Health Record, but several years of encouraging doctors to use it has resulted in … a few databased documents.
- Fifth – and perhaps most importantly – this episode confirms once again William Gibson’s old lesson that we can often discern the future by looking carefully at the present. In 2012, the world had already had high-speed broadband for the better part of a decade in places like Seoul and Tokyo. Australia, like most other developed countries, had had its own high-speed broadband between CBDs, many inner-city areas, and the universities. They both demonstrated quite practically the shape of the future; they both disproved the notion that we could only imagine that future. Even back then, the incremental benefits of extra bandwidth for technologies like videoconferencing could be seen in communications between different parts of Seoul and Tokyo, and between the Australian capital-city offices of major businesses and professional services firms – and those benefits were thin.
Three meta-lessons
One meta-lesson from Australia’s now-defunct broadband crisis may be this: don’t give in to the temptation to always perform straight-line projections of costly technologies. That was an error that superfast broadband enthusiasts gave in to: in 1999 many of us had slow broadband, and in 2012 we mostly had faster broadband, and so many enthusiasts concluded that in 2025 we would need superfast broadband. In fact, the most important characteristic of the Internet was not speed but ubiquitous, low-latency connections, which had largely already appeared by 2012. Just as the mach-2 Concorde turned out to be more air travel speed than the market required, so immediate superfast broadband turned out to be more speed than the market required in 2012.
A second meta-lesson might be that incremental upgrades can frequently get the job done. 2012’s superfast broadband fans wanted the fastest possible transformation of our internet infrastructure; in the process, they overestimated the demand for that infrastructure. In 2025 as in 2012, superfast broadband is needed in some places; it is not needed everywhere. We will, over time, get to ubiquitous superfast broadband; even as I write, NBN Co continues upgrading networks, as it should.
A third meta-lesson is that governments really should do the difficult and high-stakes work of finding and put in place the systems that will give citizens access to the specific infrastructure they need – but as they do so, should ensure they are using the best mechanisms to make those judgements. Governments should not leap at the first idea they come across that will win them an election or discomfit their enemies.
And governments should certainly not try to provide, without good reason, an inflated level of infrastructure that they think everyone might use if they got it.
Footnote: If you think this all sounds like a smart-arse being wise after the event … well, you could be right. But the archives of Club Troppo go back right through its 162 years*, so you can judge for yourself.* Yes, I made that bit up. But click the link anyway.
Comments: As usual, yes, I’m an idiot about a lot of things. I really will be grateful if you can point out in the comments specifically where my idiocy lies, and detail the huge mistake(s) I’m making.
About the author: David Walker is the principal of Shorewalker DMS, an editorial advisory firm. Shorewalker DMS specialises in helping organisations make their reports clearer , more complete and more persuasive. See our work, check out our podcasts, and hire us: https://shorewalker.net.
Twitter: @shorewalker1
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