While it’s technically outside the brief of this website, here it is anyway…

Broadband: It’s about symmetry, not speed

This topic’s background paper already shows that the speed of Australia’s broadband internet falls woefully behind OECD leaders. Existing government plans are only playing catch-up, delivering what Japan, France and Korea already have.

Raw speed is not the only factor. Just as important are three other factors:

1. The symmetry of the connection — that is, the ability to upload data to the internet as fast as it can be downloaded.
2. The latency — which can loosely be explained as the time between a user sends data and its arrival at its destination.
3. The price, especially the price of the data transmitted in each direction.

Items 2 and 3 are engineering and market problems. However the first item, symmetry, is critical to moving into the networked age.

Most current broadband connections are asymmetrical, with faster download speeds than uploads. For example, ADSL2+ technology might have download speeds exceeding 12 megabits per second, but upload speeds are only 1 megabit per second.

This builds into the very network itself the idea that internet users are “consumers” of data which is generated elsewhere — that the internet delivers “content” which is created by a relatively few large entities.

Yet the key benefit of a networked society is collaboration. And to collaborate effectively, everybody needs to be able to send high-bandwidth data — whether that’s video, audio or shared data of some kind we have yet to imagine — even if it’s only to an audience numbering in single digits.

As Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail makes clear, when the cost of distributing information plummets then it becomes possible for micro-markets to appear. An idea no longer needs a budget of millions of dollars and a correspondingly large audience to have relevance. Mass production turns into mass participation and mass customisation.

However the existing media and communications empires are built around the industrial-age idea of centralised control and delivering a uniform product to everybody. They will resist any attempt to democratise production and distribution. They will tell you that only vast national organisations can deliver reliable network infrastructure, when past experience should tell us that they precisely fail to do that.

Regional and local organizations could well do a better job of connecting communities — and those communities could then simply cross-connect to create a national network.

The technology already exists. It’s not a technical question. It’s a question of how to best structure an organisation, or an industry, to deliver the most flexible and cost-effective network infrastructure for Australian communities.

Small and medium-sized business usually respond faster and more flexibly to market demands. Bloated national and trans-national corporations may not necessarily be the answer.

For various reasons I didn’t have much time available. Yet I’ve said so much about still believing this to be an important summit — despite the plentiful shortcomings — that I felt obliged to write something. In 500 words or less.

Given that I didn’t have time for a well-researched, pithy submission, I chose to write from the heart. This is what emerged…

Managing continual, rapid change with a clear framework of values

To say that our society’s pace of change is rapidly accelerating is almost a cliché — yet it’s the truth. Young people now entering the workforce have never known a time without the internet or mobile phones — unless they recall their infancy.

Children entering school today will emerge in 2020 taking for granted the technology they’ll grow up with: mobile, high-speed data networks; pocket-sized devices which allow them to converse with anyone, anywhere, in sound and vision as well as words. Their media and political diet will be moderated as much by friends and acquaintances as by “professional” politicians and media producers — perhaps even more so.

And the generation following them will be comfortable in a world which few of us can even imagine.

It’s clear that our steam-aged constitution and parliamentary institutions will not cope.

Already young people (and some not so young) create and manage social networks with a speed that’s breathtaking. This will become the norm some time next week, or so it’ll feel. Australia’s democracy must grasp these tools which are already transforming our world — not tentatively, but with bold confidence.

If we are to experiment, our experiments must look forward not a year or three, but a decade or two. Otherwise the lessons of the experiment will be outdated before it’s even finished.

To cope in any rapidly-changing environment, two elements are essential:

1. A clear understanding of the aims and the rules of engagement.
2. A clear, flexible mechanism for evaluating our progress and adapting our methods to new conditions.

Constitutions are hard to change. If we are to update Australia’s constitution — and if this Summit ends without recommending a comprehensive review then, I believe, it will have failed — then we must ensure that our core values are locked in for another century. They must include the fundamental human and civil rights which Australia has already recognised internationally but has failed to enshrine in law.

A so-called “bill of rights” is essential. I should be written in clear and unassailable language. Anyone who resists writing into law what we’ve already agree to as fundamental rights can only intend to deny those rights to someone.

To protect those rights, and to ensure that our democracy continues to reflect them, we need a mechanism to continually check that they are not eroded. That implies some permanent institution, one whose own existence is guaranteed and well-protected against any potential political interference in the future.

In a more rapidly-changing future our lawmakers and administrators will need ways of working more rapidly. A formal institution would help ensure that we don’t trade off our rights for temporary expediency, either accidentally or as the result of incipient despotism.