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A selection of CEDA's past work on infastructure. CEDA series of events Infrastructure Australia
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This much-referenced CEDA report looks at how Australia's hard infrastructure - roads, railways, telecommunications, electric power, sea and air ports - is struggling to cope with the demands of today's economy. [Research and Policy article - Full content is only available to CEDA members]
CEDA National Director Research and Policy, Dr Michael Porter, was interviewed by The Age on the NBN rollout in Victoria.
Given the new technological and financial situation facing Australia at the end of 2008, Australia’s information policy must be modified to achieve real competition across the ‘Four Digital Doors’ of telecommunications infrastructure.
In the report, Australia's Broadband Future: Four doors to greater competition, CEDA addressed the current Australian broadband debate. While as a nation we may currently be fixated on the rollout of a national optical fibre network, we need to remind ourselves of the real question at stake: How do we deliver the best information services to customers in differing situations across the country?
The floods and cyclones, plus the need for fiscal responsibility, together create a real opportunity to meet budgetary pressures and restore common sense and competition to the implementation of faster broadband. It's a way for the Gillard government to get out of the national broadband network (NBN) bind and move towards a demand-driven model, away from a state monopoly.
Over 60 per cent of those surveyed did not support the Commonwealth funding of broadband via the national broadband network.
In the executive summary of the national broadband network business plan the government released yesterday, the word competition is used - or misused - seven times, apart from references to a complicit Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. The word missing is destruction. The plan will "decommission" competitive broadband via cable and copper, for a fee to Telstra from NBN Co of more than $11 billion.
The support of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and its chairman, Graeme Samuel, for Labor's legislation to destroy competition in broadband and the national broadband network is profoundly disturbing.
The stated policy goal for the NBN is to deliver every Australian affordable, high-speed broadband. Yet in dealing effectively with the challenges of upgrading broadband in remote and regional Australia, 4G, or Long Term Evolution wireless, and its highly efficient use of bandwidth spectrum, is just one emerging technology that may offer greater mobility and convenience than a nationwide fibre rollout.
With rail cross-subsidisation, deficits and suppression of competition started slowly. But with the NBN they have been in-built from the start. The viability of the earlier nation-building project was tested prudently at first, and only the most commercial trunk lines and best branches were constructed. It was only later that sensible social investment criteria were abandoned.