Social Enterprise and NBN

For ten years we have been waiting for the promise of telecommuting as a workplace alternative. Apart from a few trailblazers, Australian workplaces have woefully failed to deliver which begs the question....why?

I launched P3 Connect Pty Ltd as a social enterprise, aiming to take advantage of virtualisation to provide Australian women and other carers with the option of working from home. With BPOS, Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite, P3 Connect aims to encourage workers to stay at home, seeking to optimise the technology - Microsoft Office Live Meetings, SharePoint Online Services, Microsoft Office Communications Online - to realise the vision of telecommuting.

So why the reluctance of Australian enterprise to migrate desktop workers to a distributed, online environment? Information, ideas and money can flow quickly within Australia and with the rest of the world. Used strategically, Australian business can create new industries for competitive advantage.

Key to the solution is enabling cheap and accessible bandwidth nationwide. Verizon, the US security giant which administers one of the root servers of the internet, claims that : "To deal with the flow of information over the next 10 years, the capacity of the internet will need to increase by a factor of a thousand" (http://www.cnet.com/ July 9, 2010).

The debate over the NBN is now being used as a political football, but when the excitment of the election dies down, I would like to know what is going to be done about Australia ranking 50th for global broadband speeds and clocking an average internet connection of 2.6 Mbps (according to a new report from global content provider, Akami, 29th July 2010).

Ben Eggleton and David Moss write passionately as advocates for the NBN in today's Sydney Morning Herald , addressing the problem of cost:

"By rolling out broadband
infrastructure that boosts the economy by 1 per cent or more, this means the
investment will, almost immediately, more than pay for
itself."

The cost of the NBN has taken front and center stage. Australia is a big country and the plan to have every single Australian connected to high-speed broadband is far more ambitious and far more costly than, for example, a South Korean or New Zealand solution. It seems fairly obvious that the cost will scale to the size of the country and the isolation of the interior.