Page 85 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 9 February 2016
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
for two years for an internet broadband connection. He had been told there was no more capacity at the exchange for more ports. His house is five kilometres from the exchange, so already the signal is degraded. Poor internet service is affecting people throughout my electorate in Belconnen. After years of talking about broadband and its potential, Australia’s failure to roll out adequate broadband infrastructure to businesses and households is having a real impact now.
Most people do not realise this until they are shocked to find out when they buy a house or lease business premises in Canberra that they do not have adequate broadband for their needs. Businesses may find they do not have the bandwidth to support a website, to do video conference calls or to log in to customers’ procurement portals. School students may find that they have difficulty accessing their online school resources at home, making it difficult to complete their homework. Teachers have found in some locations in Canberra that they cannot access their students’ assignments online in order to mark them. Entertainment services like iView and Netflix may not be available or are only available at very poor quality. Patches of Canberra do have excellent broadband coverage. These areas were largely completed before the then communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, axed the planned Canberra rollout, which included large parts of Belconnen.
We have had only vague plans for a future rollout since then. Comparable capitals such as Wellington, New Zealand and Singapore are well ahead of Canberra. Rollout of ultra-fast fibre to the premises, 100 megabits per second download and 50 megabits per second uploads started in Wellington in 2011, with around half the premises now covered. Priority was given to businesses, schools and health facilities and the full rollout is scheduled to be completed in 2019. Singapore’s rollout of a one gigabit per second fibre to the premises next generation national broadband network is now mostly complete. These speeds are significantly better than the speeds that Mr Doszpot was skiting about just before.
Sadly, there are plenty of places around Canberra on Telstra’s ADSL download speeds of eight megabits per second, if they are lucky enough to live near an exchange, and just two megabits per second if they are further away. What is worse, there is still a percentage of Canberrans who cannot even get access to ADSL and they cannot use their network for anything but the most basic resources. The current broadband access in the ACT is inadequate for the emailing of medical documents such as MRIs, X-rays and so forth, with the result that most medical documentation remains not electronic, at huge cost to the potential for the ACT to grow as a regional centre for health services.
Property managers in Civic are exasperated in dealing with the NBN and its never-ending series of delays. Their tenants say they are losing business as they have inadequate broadband, and properties in Civic are losing business tenants. Businesses in Fyshwick, Hume and in the eastern industrial area of Beard are frustrated with their ADSL services, which are inadequate for modern business needs. They tell the government that their ability to grow is limited because they cannot get access to one of the basic building blocks of modern business—reliable high-speed broadband. Businesses in Fyshwick regularly report that it is impossible to access the internet at certain times of the day. Businesses in Hume were recently without internet services for most of a week when their ADSL service suffered a series of intermittent faults.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video