On the fibre frontier

Access: Ministers Stephen Conroy, left, and Wayne Swan hit the NBN button in Kiama, NSW

Like most tree-changers, Paul Gosney and his wife Sophie Turner were inspired by a country holiday to leave the city life. They stayed in the NSW town of Berry, but chose to move to the coastal town of Kiama, as it is closer to Sydney and right in the path of the first phase of the national broadband network (NBN).

“We wanted to be closer to the sea, to have more freedom and cheaper housing costs, so we rented [in Berry] for a year before we moved down, just to make sure we were happy with the decision,” Gosney says. “But when we decided to go ahead and buy, we needed to find somewhere that would be connected to the NBN, because we are both running our businesses from home.”

Although micro businesses in regional areas are not often at the forefront of innovation, access to the NBN is creating the opportunity for such businesses to revise their processes and take a leading role in the digital economy.

Photographers by trade, Gosney has a number of corporate clients through his business Elbow Room , while Turner runs a portrait photography business called Kisschasey Photography .

Both operate their businesses through home offices and travel to take photos on location.

“Access to [the NBN] means I can shoot a job in Sydney, come back to my home office and upload the pics to do post-production, then have them delivered back to me,” Gosney says. “Because of the upload capacity, I can do my post-production offshore.”

Unlike conventional ADSL or cable, broadband connections provided through the NBN offer a symmetrical service enabling companies to use the internet to send and receive large files. Gosney says that access to a symmetrical broadband service is gradually transforming the way he operates his business.

“I’m now looking for somewhere that can back up my files, because the files are very large, and looking to expand my business in other ways, because I’ve now got the capacity to do online training from the office,” Gosney says. “It’s something I hadn’t thought of initially, but it’s possible now.”

The vice-president of digital economy for telecommunications company
Alcatel-Lucent, Geof Heydon, says most businesses begin to use symmetrical broadband services to speed up transactions that they are already carrying out.

“Businesses don’t think about how they’re going to take advantage of the digital economy, they just look for ways to do their business better and it just so happens that they are finding the answer in information technology,” Heydon says. “It’s instinctive that once they have access to broadband and see the impact it has on one area of their business, they begin to look for other ways they can benefit from it, and that’s when they begin to really innovate.”

For example, insurance assessors quickly worked out they could upload digital photos to assess the damage done to vehicles that had been in an accident.

“It was an approach initially adopted by smaller companies and individual assessors because they didn’t have the time to drive out to all the specific locations, and within about 18 months everyone in the industry was using digital photos,” Heydon says. “It’s the smaller, more nimble companies that are tending to lead the innovation when it comes to the digital economy, whereas the larger businesses have a vested interest in maintaining existing processes and a lot more inertia.”

Construction of the NBN kicked off in 24 suburbs and towns around the country in 2011 and will be extended to another 25 in 2012, as well as to 8000 premises in 150 new estates. Heydon is particularly interested in how the businesses located in these early release sites are already finding ways to extend the impact of the high-speed symmetrical broadband service further afield.

Glow Networks managing director of IT support services, Sam Dawe, was quick to nominate his company to test the early release of the NBN in the inner Melbourne suburb of Brunswick.

“We started off by using it to host high-definition video conferencing services. A lack of bandwidth has always been a big problem for us when we were using ADSL,” Dawe says.

“When the NBN came along, it was a real game changer in terms of speed and stability, so we were able to significantly improve the service we were offering to our customers.”

Like Gosney, it wasn’t long before Dawe made the transition from using the improved connection to enhance the services he was already offering, to using it to launch a whole new business, which he refers to as “cloud on-ramping”.

Again it’s the symmetrical nature of the NBN broadband connection, offering high speeds for uploads and downloads, which allows Dawe’s clients to transfer their corporate databases rapidly into a cloud computing environment.

“We have manufacturing customers who would have taken 225 days to upload their data into a cloud environment using a traditional ADSL connection, whereas we can bring their databases in here on a server and finish the job in 135 hours, that’s from seven months down to five days,” Dawe says.

“And it’s all sizes of company that need the service, because once their data is in the cloud, they can access it using a normal, much slower connection.”

Glow Networks’ data on-ramping service is proving so popular, Dawe expects his business to expand by about 30 per cent throughout 2012, simply off the back of this NBN-enabled service.

“We don’t even have to be located in the same city as our customer base,” he says. “We’ve got one company in Perth that couriered over a replica of their database so we could upload it into the cloud, we didn’t even have to go to their premises.”

Heydon says the next phase of the NBN rollout will be more interesting still, as business takes advantage of the capacity to send and collect data from IP(internet protocol)-enabled devices.

“Business is using the new connections to enhance what they are already doing, but in the next phase they will be able to use it to roll out entirely new services,” Heydon says. “It’s not about one killer application – fibre will [allow] the development of thousands of new applications that will drive innovation throughout the economy.”

BRW

Comments (0)