Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: broadband

  • The quiet revolution

    The quiet revolution

    Earlier this weekPricewaterhouseCoopers released their Productivity Scorecard, which showed Australia’s business efficiency isn’t improving as fast at it once was and the country’s relative performance is steadily slipping down international tables.

    One of the notable things in the PwC report is the massive growth of productivity in the 1990s, a point emphasised by the accompanying paper on business productivity in a presentation by economist Saul Eslake last month to the Reserve Bank of Australia.

    Economists attribute most of this late 20th Century growth to deregulation and privatisation by governments in the 1980s and 90s but the driving force was really computerisation that allowed most businesses to do much more with less.

    Immediately noticeable for an Australian walking into a British, European or Japanese office during the early 1990s was the lack of desktop computers.

    Australian businesses adopted technology a lot quicker than their counterparts outside of North America and this alone was probably responsible for the country’s relatively good productivity growth in that decade.

    The arrival of computers – followed by desktop printers and Internet access – suddenly gave small businesses access the means to do jobs that even the biggest corporations had struggled to do previously and drove a rapid reorganisation of most offices.

    Everybody from secretaries to architects and graphic designers to lawyers – even economists – suddenly found they had the tools at their fingertips to do work they could have only dreamed of prior to 1990. This drove massive productivity gains in businesses of all sizes.

    From 2000 onwards, things became tougher as the easy gains had been made and the incremental improvements in technology, such as smartphones, cloud computing and web publishing didn’t have the same substantive effect the early PCs delivered with spreadsheets, word processing and desktop publishing.

    The real challenge we now face in business – and government – is to start harnessing cloud computing driven online services that promise to deliver similar productivity gains to what we saw twenty years ago.

    We have the tools; online office apps, Customer Relation Management services (CRM) and sharing platforms all deliver major improvements in the way we work within our businesses and with external partners like contractors, suppliers and event clients.

    One of the most powerful aspects of cloud computing services is reduced capital cost meaning reduced barriers to entry into markets we previously may have thought were safe.

    This easy access into established sectors is one of reasons the retail industry’s giants are now struggling as online competitors can setup cheaply and quickly while offering better prices and service.

    Retail is only one of the more obvious sectors being changed by these technologies and as the decade continues we’re going to close to every industry be radically changed by low cost computers accessing the Internet.

    As business owners and managers we need to look at our own processes and systems with an eye on how we can improve workflows and customer service within our organisations.

    Those of us who manage to get these new technologies are going to reap the benefit of the next productivity wave, those who don’t are going to go the way that many uncompetitive and slow to respond industries did in the 1980s.

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  • How broadband won the Australian election

    How broadband won the Australian election

    In a dour and negative Australian election campaign, the National Broadband Network was the one issue separated the look alike policies of the two major parties. In the end, it decided the election.

    Privately developed communications networks are rare in the nation’s history for a combination of factors including Australia’s population distribution and commercial appetites for investment risk.

    Australian governments have always been critical to the development of regional communications, from the establishment of state operated railway networks, through the post office owned telegraph and telephone networks and eventually the road system.

    So the National Broadband Network is typical of Australian communications development where the government provides the infrastructure framework and the private sector grows around it.

    There’s no doubt regional communities understood the importance of being connected to the global economy, successive Federal governments have struggled with a patchwork of government programs such as the Universal Service Obligation and Broadband Connect in an effort to guarantee some level of service for all Australian communities.

    The NBN itself was conceived in the realisation that any solution that relied wholly on private funding was not going to deliver a national solution. This was view that regional organisations such as Digital Tasmania had held all along when agitating for their communities not being left behind.

    And Tasmania was were the vote mattered, the coalition failed to win any Tasmanian seats where three would have been won had the state followed the rest of the nation. Those three seats; Bass, Franklin and Braddon would have been enough to give the Liberal and National Parties power.

    Had the coalition focussed on the legitimate criticisms of the NBN such as the government’s failure to quantify the $43 billion price tag or NBNCo’s failure to produce a business plan then they may well have won the election.

    As the country Independents stated, the NBN was one of the key considerations in their decision to support the Labor government, so not getting their NBN policy right cost the coalition government in two ways.

    Now the NBN is going ahead we need to focus on what it can deliver, along with a sensible discussion on the right mix of fibre and wireless infrastructure, the proportion of private and public investment and exactly how much the project is going to cost.

    Now is the time to get on with building what will be the 21st Century equivalent of the roads and railways of the 20th and 19th Centuries.

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  • Big, hairy broadband goals

    Big, hairy broadband goals

    fibre_opticThis column first appeared in SmartCompany. Since writing it, I’ve also done an ABC spot on the National Broadband rollout.

    The more I research and reflect on the proposal, the more I’m convinced this plan is a winner – assuming it goes ahead.

    I’m also more convinced than ever that Telstra is the big winner from the proposal as it relieves them of the Universal Service Obiligation and means they can avoid the massive costs of maintaining and upgrading the copper network. Not to mention the likelihood that the government will end up leasing space on Telstra’s existing fibre network.

    Jim Collins in his book “Good to Great” coined the phrase BHAG, or Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Few goals are bigger or more audacious than spending $43 billion to run fibre to every house, office, school, farm and factory in Australia.

    My first reaction to the national broadband plan was disappointment – on Twitter I commented “there goes the Rudd Government’s final strand of tech credibility.”

    Having had time to think about the plan, it’s clear I was wrong. The announcement is a huge change in policy and it will have immense ramifications on how we do business.

    Fibre-to-the-premises completes the gaps in our communications systems. When the rollout is complete, we can rely on our internet links and assume our customers and employees have the same dependable connections.

    For regional enterprises this is great news, as it will bring the world to the door to some of Australia’s best industries and businesses. It levels the playing field between big and small businesses, regardless of their location.

    For Telstra, the result is mixed. While it means more competition in regional areas, it also means it can save billions on upgrading the aging copper network. The criticism of the rollout’s cost ignores the massive replacement cost already required to replace the old phone lines.

    While perhaps not good news for management, the proposed break up of Telstra is good for shareholders. Sensis and BigPond, for example, would be worth far more when not shackled to a company fixated on maximising revenue from a ramshackle copper network.

    Another great change is in Canberra’s communications policy. Australia has suffered from communications and media being tied together, with the interests of well connected commercial groups being more important than good planning.

    The Keating government’s disastrous cable TV rollout was an attempt to provide modern infrastructure while appeasing the dominant media tycoons who saw technology as a threat to their empires.

    As a result we got a mess and the cable TV networks, which could have provided this infrastructure 15 years ago became a political and financial quagmire, which delivered little of what was promised.

    We shouldn’t understate the social benefits of the plan either. As the recession bites, the need for skilled and unskilled labour to build the rollout will assist in keeping unemployment down.

    It’s certainly billions of dollars better spent than propping up shopping centre developers, banks or the manufacturers of cars that no-one wants.

    The biggest change though is ideology. Until now, it’s been difficult to imagine a government proposing a massive infrastructure project without the ticket clippers of the merchant banks and other cronies skimming a fat share.

    In every respect, this is the best communications plan and one of the most visionary ideas we’ve seen out of Canberra in generations. While it’s going to cost, history will show it’s money well spent.

    Whether the broadband rollout becomes reality or not, fast, reliable communications are already a business necessity and will become even more so.

    Think about what fast broadband means for your business and plan how you can take advantage of it. Those who don’t grasp the opportunities are going to be left behind.

    So have a think about it. You might come up with some BHAGs of your own.

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    • No Related Posts

  • The broadband explosion

    For a typical exciting Sunday afternoon, I’ve been trolling through the Telstra annual report.

    One statistic that leaps out at me is the growth in consumer broadband subscribers of nearly 60%, even if we assume all the 373,000 customers who ditched their dial up plans went over to broadband, that’s still a whopping 35% growth in customers.

    According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the nine month growth in consumer broadband connections from June 2006 to March 2007 (not quite the same period) was 46%.

    The decline in dial up connection was 26% over the nine months, as opposed to Telstra’s decline of 36.3% over the twelve months.

    Interestingly, Telstra’s dial up decline would have been greater if their systems allow customers to transfer their existing dial up email address to broadband. As it stands, they have to retain their dial up account and we steer customers to Bigpond’s Casual User Plan as a cheap way of doing this.

    So Telstra’s performance isn’t out of the line with the industry. What it does show is the massive take up of broadband. It’s also profitable, as Telstra’s report also shows their income has grown by over 66%.

    Over the next few weeks I’ll have a look at how other providers are doing. It will be interesting to see how others are performing.

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