With the growing adoption of broadband connections in businesses and homes, content providers need to start thinking about how to cater to broadband audiences. Is the broadband user significantly different? What are the killer apps for broadband audiences? And what do content providers need to think about to cope with the new demands?
Broadband technology provides new opportunities, but also new challenges to Australian Web businesses. Although broadband is growing, Australia currently lags well behind the rest of the world in broadband deployment, according to Gartner research director Geoff Johnson.
-We're still doing the plumbing, and Singapore did it four years ago. How many Internet years is that?," he asks.
-Given that we've already got an Internet economy that's narrowband, and plenty of adoption of it, we really haven't made that broadband leap. We could have done it with cable four years ago but we got lost in the Foxtel-Optus silly sideshow. Singapore had cable modems in the middle of '97 and DSL by Christmas '97. We're still getting the plumbing right."
However, not everyone believes Australia is so far behind the rest of the world.
-I suspect that's not actually true," says John Ellershaw, chief technology officer of broadband consultancy Quadtel.
-Numbers are very hard to come by because a majority of broadband customers in Australia are still cable modem customers. The cable modems are owned by Telstra and Optus and they're exclusive users, so they don't have to tell anyone and they're not telling anyone."
Ellershaw estimates that the number of cable modem customers is between 50,000 and 70,000 and the number of ADSL customers at between 15,000 and 20,000. This is higher than Gartner's estimate of 67,000 customers combined at the end of last year, however it represents a much smaller proportion of the population than other countries. Only 0.4 percent of the Australian population has a home broadband connection at the end of last year. This compares with 7.2 percent in Canada, 5.8 percent in Korea, 2.4 percent in Singapore, and 2.1 percent in the US. However, predictions are that by the end of this year, broadband users will have grown to 346,000 and ADSL will have overtaken cable, according to IDC research.
If Australia is lagging, this has significant implications for Australian businesses, because it impacts strongly on our export of professional services, says Johnson.
-Australia has got a reputation in two areas: we do a lousy job of manufacturing elaborately transformed manufactured goodsââ,¬"we import all the hardware. What we do a good job of is we're a sophisticated end user and we export our professional services skills.
-It's a global economy, it's a service economyââ,¬"we all trade, we all compete. Korea is killing us. Singapore and Hong Kong are very capable. Here we are at home, clunking around with ISDN and a bit of Frame Relay, while the world is ripping ahead with DSL. Applications around the world are being written assuming this infrastructure exists; we're not even playing with it yet. How are we going to get leadership?"
-As long as Australia lags behind the rest of the world in infrastructure, this will be a barrier to developing innovative and competitive services," says Johnson.
-We've still got the plumbers in messing around at the transport level, nobody's going to be in there, assuming it's wallpaper and doing interesting applications making money because they've got a business built on it."
Despite this barrier, it's still important to start making plans now.
-Given the infrastructure is slow to market, that just means you've got to get your business plan together," says Johnson. -If there is a gap, you've got to figure how to make it up."
He believes the infrastructure problems are going to go away quite rapidly, anticipating this happening sometime this year. -By about the end of first quarter next year there will be enough coverage of exchanges with DSL that it won't be an issue. In the US they assume bandwidth is cheap and bandwidth is there to burn, so the applications are inefficient, but they get them out the door in a hurry. If there's any doubtââ,¬"throw bandwidth at the problem. -We've never had that luxury because of our pricing, but we've got to start thinking about those techniques. The packages we buy from overseas are based on that infrastructure, and the services we'd like to sell in Asia and around the world are based on that infrastructure, but it doesn't exist here."
Have the authors and commentators overlooked a significant thread in their weaving of the 'Harnessing broadbands's potenital' canvas?
I have a domestic broadband Internet connection, I have video on demand and I receive my TV signal from my broadband service provider. Is it Telstra? No. Am I a bleeding-edge 'early adopter'? No. Is it expensive? No.
I'm just another TransACT subscriber (and loving it).
I would have liked to see the TransACT experience mentioned in the article, because they seem to be an 'aware' bunch with a clear vision of how the potential of broadband can be harnessed.
Now if only FoxTel could see the light and become a TransACT content provider!