NZ earthquake: the first respondent was online

Tweets, texts and wikis. From beneath the rubble of Christchurch’s nightmare, online services are again proving how quickly people and information can be connected in an emergency.
It’s been staggering how quickly New Zealand has responded. With about a quarter of its population overseas at any given time, all around the world Kiwis have been craving information from the wreckage of Christchurch’s streets, looking for real-time updates about loved ones.
And they haven’t been let down. As is now the drill the first respondents to a natural disaster on this scale are the social networks and services that are up and running online.
Among them Google’s people tracker—a tool to bring together information about survivors and the friends and relatives looking for them—is a simple two-click option and a fast way to collate details from the chaos that engulfs an emergency on this level.
Within hours of the quake the search giant also launched a Crisis Response resource, a one-stop portal for all news updates, real-time feeds from Twitter and other micro blogging sites as well as emergency services information.
How else would people know that the Christchurch-Arthurs Pass-Greymouth train services had been cancelled until March and free WiFi hotspots were being made available at Telecom Riccarton Mall?
Teamed by volunteers from around the world “working to process information” CrisisCampNZ was another first respondent online.
The web site reports launched a people finder and a resource to lodge incident reports.
Government web sites, too, have been running hot. The NZ Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management is using RSS feeds and Twitter to give information updates about the earthquake.
FutureGov’s citizen engagement journalist, Adrienne Valdez, spoke to Vince Cholewa, the ministry’s Public Information Manager.
He said that social networking was just one of the resources being used to help locate people and relate information to the public.
“It’s one of the media that the ministry uses. There is no one medium that is going to reach all the people you need to reach,” he said.
“Whether it’s radio, TV or different kinds of social media: each one has a specific audience, so the wider the range of media you can use, the wider the audience.”
Any changes in the emergency status or any news update on the earthquake triggers anRSS feed and sends out a Tweet from the ministry web site.
Messages will say “an update has been issued” and a tinyurl will lead back to the official site for more information.
“We’re not trying to engage in conversation or use Twitter or Facebook as a discussion medium, we haven’t gone that far,” he adds.
Traditional communication tools haven’t past their shelf life just yet either, as not everyone has access to online services in a crisis of this scale.
Cholewa recalls that following the Christchurch quake in September 2010, major retailers sold 19,000 battery-powered radios.
“That’s because if the power’s out, you can’t get online; your mobile battery is run down and you can’t charge them, and there is no other communication reaching you aside from the radio.”
But there’s no doubt New Zealand’s citizens have played the biggest role in the proliferation of news and information through their own personal feeds.
Be it Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter—Christchurch’s call has been heard loud and clear online.

Egypt shows the cost of ignoring real-time dialogue

I find it hard to hack through the different assumed roles of government—service deliverer to some, content manager, producer-come-editor to others. You can add to that the role of real-time communicator.
Love it or loath it, citizen engagement is now an endemic part of everyone’s function in government, and the speed at which citizens are communicating is increasing.
Social media has been a game changer in that respect. As events unfolding in the Middle East and Africa quite poignantly reveal: failing to adapt to changes in citizen behaviour or addressing a disengaged population on their terms is not an option in a digital age.
Egypt’s revolution—or Revolution 2.0 as some have called it—and the revolt in Tunisia show that governments that maintain the status quo, shut down dissent and turn a blind eye to citizens’ demands, are on borrowed time.
Part of the widening gulf between the old and the new ways of engaging is a failure to transition from analogue to digital—literally and metaphorically.

Some governments are hopelessly locked in an analogue world: they don’t see that communication has evolved. At the same time, through social media, disgruntled voters and dissident groups are moving to one another like balls of mercury.
Zachary Tumin, Special Advisor to the Director, Science, Technology and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School spoke to me about this transition: “Some of the essential elements of the vision we see around the world are, of course, increased transparency, real-time engagement by government and citizens: via text, mobile and the Web—it’s a bi-directional conversation rather than a ‘talk-at-you’ engagement.”
That seachange that has taken place in the last decade, but particularly in the last four or five years through social media and new Web 2.0 tools. And the pace of change in the Middle East is dramatic.
The Dubai School of Government’s recent Arab Social Media Report in its inaugural edition found that the number of Facebook users in the region almost doubled in 2010, from 11.9 million to 21.3 million.
The report analysed data on Facebook users in all 22 Arab countries, in addition to Iran and Israel.
Usurped governments not only have been blind-sided by a vocal citizenry, talking faster online than propagation can keep up, but the notion that the citizen-to-government ‘dialogue’ is now happening in real-time.
Tumin says that governments understand that citizens are now active participants or ‘producers’.
“Open data has allowed us to find the answer to complicated problems faster and we see the trend towards treating citizens not as objects but co-producers in a system of solutions,” he says.
Of the governments that continue to ignore this reality: “They’re going to lose eventually,” he says, “because government leaders who connect and mobilise their citizens through Web 2.0 tools can do so quicker, faster and cheaper than people who don’t.”

Reaching the final third: London's real Olympic goal

Just in case it passed you by, I’m going to refer to some of the startling figures we heard at the Sri Lanka FutureGov Forum event in December on the issue of digital inclusion.
They show how very real the digital divide is across Asia. According to research conducted by LIRN Asia Research, 74 per cent of Sri Lanka’s poor rural population had never used the internet, 23 per cent didn’t know it even existed.
Those kinds of figures are replicated across Asia, but the digital divide as a global policy issue has a divide of its own—between developing and developed worlds: the latter is struggling to connect the ‘final third’ of its citizens, whereas the former is dealing with largescale infrastructure challenges and huge remote and rural populations.
In the UK, where I’m from, much has been made of offering low cost laptops, £98 (US$158), to those who don’t have access, through the London: Race Online 2012 initiative, a Government-sponsored push to close the digital divide before the 2012 Games.
That is an initiative which has been successful in connecting rural and remote communities across Asia, although a recurring problem is ensuring programme sustainability.
Developing nations, who are championing e-government, faster broadband and a closer relationship between government and citizen through Gov 2.0 initiatives have, without doubt, been guilty of taking their digital eye off the ball.
If you’re not online in the UK, you’re excluded from a wide selection of service offerings—banks, the National Health Service (NHS), online shopping and recruitment, to name just a few, are established in delivering premium online services (groceries from large supermarkets are cheaper purchased online).
Developing nations are realising that in order for a digital economy to be ubiquitous, this policy problem has to be solved.
If you’re unemployed and unconnected the outlook is bleak. In 2007, over seven million jobs were advertised online in the UK, some exclusively, a figure which is set to increase significantly when cuts begin to roll out across the public sector in the coming months.
Cash-strapped councils will place most of their vacancies online in order to save money, according to the Department for Communities and Local Government.
Even the recruitment of the 8,000 London Ambassadors required to make the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games run smoothly, is primarily being conducted online.
Libraries, also a likely target of the austerity measures, were formerly a guaranteed safe-port-in-a-storm for those unable to get Internet access at home.
But the UK’s Public Library Modernisation Programme, worth £2 million (US$ 3.3 million), was recently shelved by the Department of Culture Media and Sport.
If you’re young, the future is bleak: “It highlights the effects that the Government’s drive to increase online services has on young people who have limited or no access to the internet,” a recent report Young People and the Digital Dividepublished by the advocacy group Catch 22 highlights.
Marketing gurus won’t like this but there are a significant number of young people who aren’t ‘digital natives’: they don’t walk around with an iPhone in their hand and wouldn’t know Angry Birds from World of Warcraft.
It is a cruel, but assumed logic, that all young people are, but as the Catch-22 report stresses: “While research suggests that the majority of young people are online, there are a number of young people who have either limited or no access to the Internet.
“These young people are increasingly invisible to policy makers and those whose responsibility it is to bring everyone online.”
A home computer and internet connection could increase potential lifetime earnings for young people in digitally excluded households by over £10.8billion (US$17.45 billion), a report conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers alongside London: Race Online 2012 found.
That is a startling statistic. If the London Olympics does succeed in closing that divide, it will be some achievement.

Gov 2.0 is missing a coherent narrative

The more I chat to people at the sharp end of the OpenGov or Gov 2.0 movement, the more I find myself questioning the sustainability of its driving force, and the way in which it has managed to be collectively pigeon-holed as the nice fluffy bit on the side of policy and decision making—the strawberries on the spongecake, the mustard on the hot dog or Tinkerbell’s fairy dust, sprinkled wistfully across selected departments.
I wondered why that was. At an event in Hong Kong towards the end of 2010 I approached a senior official in the Hong Kong Government to ask how he assessed the takeup of Web 2.0 tools within his government and how they were being used to connect with citizens. The answer I got was refreshingly blunt: “I think most of them are just wishing it will all go away.”

But even at the very top of the Gov 2.0 chain of command there are lingering doubts about whether the buy-in is sustainable, or even if it is there.
“Momentum is building within the Australian government with attitudes changing over a broad front,” Australia’s Gov 2.0 Taskforce Chair Nicholas Gruen tells us in the next edition of FutureGov Asia Pacific. “We will see more evidence of this in the next few years.”
Dustin Haisler, the former CIO of Manor, Texas, and a leading light of the Gov 2.0 movement through  work such as his open innovation platform, Manor Labs, which invites people far and wide to participate in addressing the city’s problems, says there is still more work to be done in understanding the ROI of Gov 2.0.
“What is missing from Gov 2.0 is actually not a technology component, it’s an education component,” he tells me.
“We need to understand what it is Gov 2.0 is, what it is set to accomplish and why it is valuable. It is going back to the business value of technology.”
He goes on: “What I tell agencies is to try and identify a business value you’re trying to achieve—if you’ve taken something up because it’s the cool thing to do or your neighbouring communities have done it, you’re not going to gain anything out of that.”
Manorlabs helped empower citizens by offering them a platform to contribute to the city’s development and was hugely successful in gaining attention to how citizens can play an active role in government, if presented with the right tools and the right platforms.
Gov 2.0 or the Open Government movement is struggling with its own empowerment problem or rather its soul is getting lost in an endless struggle to define itself. It is unable to project its own narrative.
I don’t know why that is, exactly. But up until last year for every one official I met who was singing its praises from the rooftops, there were just as many suggesting it had no place at the business end of policy making.
Most, if not all of the people I meet who are passionate about the future of Open Government, are not decision makers: they work in small teams or on the fringes of government; getting support and recognition from elected officials is like trying to flag the attention of a passing juggernaut.
The best examples—like Manorlabs and several others I can think of in Australia—have shown that a culture of innovation must be encouraged from the top down and the bottom up simultaneously, but not many government departments are prepared to take a step in either direction. Perhaps because they’re keen to see how this movement plays out, indulging it through the conference circuit.
Haisler says that agencies in the US need to focus on empowering the right people, “giving the right people who make the decisions the freedom that they need to embrace these technologies.”
That seachange in government is still a way off. We know that the tools and the technology are there, that is very clear—but at the highest level no one seems capable of refining the Gov 2.0 story, and that leaves a cloud of doubt over its narrative arc.

Queensland floods a call for spatial investment

I spent a while chatting to representatives from Australia at a forum in Singapore for geospatial professionals—organised by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)—towards the end of December.
Its message, in the light of the unfolding events in Brisbane and around Queensland, was quite prophetic.
It was that maps are central to all government decision making: they tell us where and who. The speed with which maps get made available by media outlets show just how much citizens crave spatial visibility when natural disaster strikes: it gives scale and context to an unfolding tragedy, but more importantly it enables governments to allocate resources and plan for future disasters.
The role of maps is key, I was told, for future ‘spatially-enabled’ societies in a digital age.
The OGC, a not-for-profit standards organisation founded in 1994, focuses on bringing worldwide national mapping agencies together with all the major providers of geospatial technologies (Earth imaging, GIS, navigation, facilities management, location services etc.) to create open geoprocessing standards.
Executive Director, Marketing and Communications at the OGC, Steve Ramage, writes in our January issue of FutureGov Asia Pacific: “Forward-thinking officials and government employees are becoming knowledgeable about Web-based information systems.”
That may be true. But as with everything involving governments in a digital age, issues abound on the role of the data—quality data—needed to create the services that will spatially enable agencies and give citizens the best chance of assessing their own circumstances.
At the moment, it seems that spatial information only gets its dues when natural disasters strike, and even then it is generally disaggregated and confusing to citizens. And yet, as we currently live and breath with mobile in hand, maps are all pervasive. We use them every day.
Investment in satellites for Australia has been touted as an answer to providing more accurate information in the upshot to the Queensland floods. The role of data and information collected and collated by citizens on the ground—through mobile phones—is another vast untapped resource for governments.
These will, you feel, play a vital role in creating spatially-enabled communities, and in linking governments to their sister departments and their citizens too.
One of the refrains I hear around data availability in Australia is around the freedom with which data is released for Mashup competitions—the Gov 2.0 devices used to get citizens creating iPhone applications—by governments.
Freeing up data sets held by large state and federal agencies has been an up-at-dawn pride-swallowing siege in Australia, by all accounts.
At the conference in Singapore, the overarching call was for more open standards around mapping and data and, in particular, for continuous funding as opposed to funding by cycles.
Two years on from the Black Saturday bushfires, which devastated communities in rural Victoria and left 173 people dead, Australia is again asking how communities could have better prepared.

Mentor and friend: Korea's KOICA and its e-development role

I didn’t want to harp back to 2010 for this first blog entry of the new decade, but then I remembered a dinner I had after the FutureGov Forum in Hanoi last month.
I was invited out by a friend, Chang-hak Choi, President of Korea’s Culture and Service Information Agency to meet some of his ‘students’—a young and enthusiastic collection of civil servants from various strands of the Vietnamese Government.
Dr Choi does a lot of work with the Vietnamese government on behalf of the Korean International Co-operation Agency (KOICA), as part of the organisation’s role in promoting ICT expertise and best practice to support the Millenium Development Goals.
His expertise is e-government—he talks about the structural barriers to rolling out a national e-government programme, and how the integral change message must come from the top down, among other things, as it did in Korea (it is not widely known that Korea leapt from 15th to 1st on the UN’s ICT rankings in just eight years).
Long after dinner had finished and by pure coincidence I bumped into the Head of Public Procurement for the Ministry of Finance from Mongolia.
He was in Hanoi to attend a workshop held by the World Bank and to talk about the rollout of a national e-procurement scheme.
In terms of change management, it is a massive job: It will involve more public disclosure of government procurement—not exactly in everyone’s best interest— through a one-stop bid system.
By 2013, he told me, all procurement transactions in Mongolia will be done online.
Only after we discussed project partnerships did I realise that the entire e-procurement model was based on Korea’s same system, supported by KOICA with Korean expertise and technology.
KOICA’s reach is astonishing. In 2008, it delivered 39.7 per cent of its total aid budget or US$109.3 million to support 29 countries in the Asian region (21 countries in Asia and 8 countries in Oceania).
Among its Asian partner countries, Cambodia received the largest volume of aid—US$13.1 million, followed by Mongolia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
The top five partners in the region received 19.5 per cent of KOICA’s total project budget or 49.2 per cent of budget allocation focused on Asia.
It is often commented that ASEAN—the regional body that represents the batch of mainly developing South East Asian nations—has been slow to address the benefits of ICT in its grouping.
It has an ICT masterplan in the making, which was developed under the guidance of a taskforce, but it is not vocal in its work and there is no obvious trace of progress.
It is that void that organisations like KOICA are filling, with years of expertise, cutting edge technology and change management experience.
Dinner with Dr Choi and his students was delicious by the way: traditional Vietnamese food served on the banks of one of the many lakes dotted around the city.
The following day he was off to neighbouring Cambodia, once again to talk about the role of e-government in development.

Leadership in the 'i' of the beholder

I didn’t take this job to delve into the musings of fashionistas but I did find this quote from Coco Chanel an alluring reference to the uptake of the iPad in government in 2010.
“It is the unseen, unforgettable, ultimate accessory of fashion that heralds your arrival and prolongs your departure.” It has seemed that way.
I’ll also add that in no way am I plugging Apple products here, but merely acknowledging what I’ve seen in the many interviews, press conferences and events I’ve attended in the Asia Pacific region this year: that the iPad is to government leadership in 2010, what the mobile phone was to Gordon Gekko in the popular 1981 film Wall Street: a symbol.
As Gekko’s mobile phone—however big—represented Wall Street largesse, the iPad in 2010 is a symbol of the forward-thinking leader.
The iPad has allowed leaders to pose as connected digital citizens when they don’t reply to their own emails and don’t update their own Twitter feeds. It can be confusing.
I wonder, has a device ever been used with such wanton by government leaders? It’s a ready-made manual PR machine, exemplified by two of Europe’s best practitioners: British Prime Minister David Cameron was quick to be photographed poking its touchscreen, he was gifted two iPads as housewarming presents following the May election; and Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi is known to be an avid user.
Less known is the Asian addiction to the tablet. I was at a conference in Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago where I learned that the Chief Executive had to be warned against effusive Apple iPad reviews during public addresses. He’s rarely seen in public without it.
So too the interview I recently did with Malaysia’s Chief Justice, Zaki Azmi, who will feature in our February issue. He played with his iPad throughout the two-hour long interview I did with him at his office in Putrajaya.
Azmi has presided over a dramatic overhaul in the Malaysian judiciary that will see a massive backlogue of 350,000 civil cases and 80,000 criminal cases nilled—wiped out—by April 2011.
He’s done this through a number of methods: increasing the number of judges (from 90 to 137) and their salaries; setting up separate civil cases courts; clearing cases over the weekends; and, encouraging lawyers to mediate before going to court.
On top of that he’s brought the judiciary into the new century through an e-court system that tracks cases and cuts down delays; cases are all electronically filed, courts all use a queue management and case management system, and Azmi, as he shows me himself, responds personally to case complaints from around the country: via his iPad. It’s a good touch—pun intended.
But it shows some leaders are not all for show. Like the Roman philosopher Seneca cautioned, leaders shouldn’t mistake life’s accessories for life itself: “they are like them that go too fast in a maze: their very haste confuses them.”

After the cyber attack, before the war

Georgia’s Vice Prime Minister, Giorgi Baramidze, and the former Director of Governmental Special Communications and Information Agency, Vasil Gogoladze, were in Singapore last week to talk about the 2008 cyber attacks that paved the way for war with Russia.
They both expressed a keener focus on how to define ‘war’ in the light of their experiences and whether a cyber attack should be classified as an act of war, given its debilitating effect on national infrastructure and stability.
Officially the war between Georgia and Russia began with a series of distributed denial of service attacks – commonly known in the IT security industry as DDoS attacks – that crippled not only the country’s infrastructure, but its judiciary and its entire government decision-making apparatus.
As a precursor to a war – a ground offensive by Russian forces - it was efficient.
Vice Prime Minister Giorgi Baramidze tells me: “The week before, as it appeared later, the conventional war had started – the presidential website was shut down and several days before the fighting started, we witnessed significant attacks against Georgia’s military and other systems, including media outlets.
“It was devised to isolate Georgia from the rest of the world, and it was significant for the Russian’s to gain the momentum to launch an attack.”
As we spoke Mayanmar suffered a similar co-ordinated attack. The DDoS that brought the country’s internet traffic to a halt three days prior to an election intensified between 10-15 gigabytes per second of bandwidth at the country’s Ministry of Post and Telecommunication – the main portal for internet traffic in and out of the nation.
Much bigger threats have wreaked havoc on a global scale.The Stuxnet virus – dubbed the “first directed cyber weapon” has infected a high number of power plants, pipelines and factories. It could be used to control plant operations remotely.
From whichever way you approach the global problem of cyber security, the scale of the threats are growing disproportionally to policy frameworks devised to mitigate them.
As I’ve heard time and again, frameworks are required to manage cyber crime, but are there any noteworthy frameworks to mitigate cyber attacks?
In Asia there is not one over-arching cyber security model. NATO countries will convene next week when cyber security will be discussed, perhaps redressed as an act of warfare.
The EU, which has been exposed by cyber threats, recently ran its first ever pan-European cyber-attack simulation exercise, involving attempts by hackers to paralyse critical online services in several EU Member States, based on a scenario where internet connectivity between European countries would be gradually lost or significantly reduced in all participating countries.
The event was organised by EU Member States with support from the European Network Security Agency (ENISA) and the Joint Research Centre (JRC). More complex cyber security scenarios will ultimately be tested, going from European to global level.
Simulations and directives seem to be the way forward then.
Georgia’s response was to tighten up its own institutions and extend a hand to “partners” inside and outside of government.
“We immediately began to consult with our friends and created a taskforce to deal with these issues under a National Security Council,” Baramidze says.
“We have created units and procedures that will organise institutions to meet this challenge and we’re working to constantly to improve it.
“The system isn’t fixed, but it’s an ongoing process.”

Cloud computing: the false, fud and federated

Last week, Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels, gave a talk to students at the Singapore Management University.
Facilitated by the Singapore Government’s lead ICT agency – the Infocomm Development Agency (IDA), the subject was cloud computing.
You’re not likely to get much push back from perhaps the world’s leading provider of infrastructure-as-a-service, but to the unconverted (ie. me) there was enough in there to convince that the zeitgeist is not large, hard-to-manage and expensive-to-run integrated IT systems.
Globally, we are already seeing large cloud environs opening up in the public sector, and Vogels stated where the diametrically-opposed lines are drawn. As day is to night, so will ‘old IT’ be to ‘new IT’. Vogels talks about different clouds too - the private cloud, the false cloud.
“I always class the things that are happening in cloud computing with the new world of IT, old style IT was about really complex interfaces,” he says, “very long-term contracts just to get a good price on a piece of enterprise software that you want to build.
“Old style IT would make software really complex: the cost of moving away from the deep complex integrated systems would be too high - you couldn’t walk away from it.”
Cloud computing is about “giving control to the customer. It’s a simple storage service,” he adds.
Simple it might be, but despite all of its obvious pros – cost-efficiency, scaleability and so on – the ‘myths’ which surround cloud not only persist but are frequently perpetuated, and in some cases are holding governments back.
Vogels says. “There are a lot of myths floating around about cloud computing in general, a lot of FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt: ‘the cloud’s not secure’, ‘the cloud is not viable’, ‘it’s only about money’.”
A report published by The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) to the Federal Government last month warned: “the use of cloud services raises new issues in regard to privacy, security, trust, data transfer capacity and lock-in with service providers.
“Privacy legislation which pre-dates the development of cloud-based services needs to be reviewed”.
The software-as-a-service market is also now so stifling that the private sector has united to address interoperability issues around the cloud.
Formed last week, the Open Data Alliance Centre – which includes 70 of the world’s biggest companies – set about the lofty aim of unifying standards for technology.
The argument goes that systems that do not work together are holding back the spread of cloud computing.
As a block, the 70 represent a staggering $50bn of global IT spend, so it’s a significant watershed in the growth arc of cloud computing that such a stand is being made.
So now add to security and viability, the problem of interoperability.
What about governments and the much-talked-about G-cloud? Should governments be discussing ways to include all product vendors in terms of the software used to provide infrastructure-as-a-service? Or developing open source options too?
For one thing, cloud has brought government departments into the same fold - they know they are moving into a new paradigm of collaboration and service delivery and are weighing up all of the options.
Is there a good argument for broaching vendors about their own cloud concerns and strategies? If, for nothing else, to avoid the duplication they so often berate about their legacy systems.

Australia battles its broadband demons

Workers in Australia’s ICT industry have never had it so good – not only has broadband taken its place as a ‘water cooler’ topic, it has brought with it unprecedented levels of investment. But not everyone’s happy.
I sat at a roundtable held at the Australian High Commission in Singapore yesterday with a trade delegation from Australia, made up of organisations including peak industry bodies the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) and the Communications Alliance and iiNet, an Australian internet provider.
Research and development was represented by two leading government agencies: the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and National ICT Australia (NICTA), with the lone government voice heralding from Queensland.
Opposite were a string of members from Singapore’s Infocomm Development Agency (IDA) and local and regional industry representatives and academics.
As its title suggests, the Digital Economy and Broadband Application delegation’s role is to ‘examine the benefits of high speed broadband and opportunities created by the National Broadband Network (NBN) rollout’.
Another job for the intrepid travellers has been to tout Australia’s own ICT research sector – Australian innovation is at the core of Wireless LAN, the technology behind Google Maps, and the Australian developed L4 microkernel used on 800 million mobile phones worldwide.
One of the first questions posed from the Singapore side of the table was why broadband had divided politics in Australia. Not an easy opening ball.
The size of the investment would be one reason - A$43 billion is a polarising figure. But Korea, Japan and Singapore - all destinations covered by this delegation - have celebrated broadband success with much more sustained levels of investment.
In 2010 Japan will spend an estimated US$348 billion on ICT, South Korea US$76 billion, and Singapore US$20 billion. Currently, more than 80 per cent of Koreans enjoy broadband services in their homes.
What’s at stake on broadband in Australia? As the CSIRO quite rightly informed the roundtable, health services would be bolstered through web-based medical care and telemedicine. Remote work practices in Australia’s economy-propelling mines - as being used by mining giant Rio Tinto - are a significant boost too, as is internet telephoning and many more of broadband’s benefits.
The speed at which information is being consumed and exchanged and the pace at which mobile services have developed, all point to a need for more greater speed and bandwidth.
Sweden, Norway, Ukraine and the US have all started to offer services at even higher broadband speeds, moving to next generation wireless platforms.
The roundtable heard also about the geographic challenges Australia faces on broadband – the economics of covering 8 million square kilometres with cable. From Perth in Western Australia, it is more than 2000kms to the next city.
But Down Under it often comes back to the politics – the NBN was a national election issue in Australia in August, even an election-deciding issue; its cost and whether it can be effectively rolled out has dominated national debate.
There’s another potential spanner in the works – an ongoing standoff with the formerly fully government-owned telecommunications provider, Telstra, which is being required as part of the NBN rollout to free up its cables to competitors.
That was a talking point too, and whether Australia can move beyond its domestic obstacles to bring broadband to its furthest reaches, remains to be seen.