Aardvark Daily

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The risks of a national broadband network

19 March 2009

A growing number of countries, including Australia and New Zealand, have announced plans to build nation-wide broadband networks (NBN) as a way of providing their people with timely, affordable access to hi-speed internet and other IP services.

On the face of it, this sounds like a great idea.

As we move inexorably into the 21st century, our reliance on fast digital communications continues to grow and businesses are increasingly reliant on the Net for their day-to-day activity.

This fact has never been more obvious that during the growing number of "outages" experienced by Telecom internet customers of late, and yesterday was no exception.

Many Wellington users of Telecom's IP-based services were left high and dry yesterday when an unknown fault brought the company's network to its knees and left customers without internet (and in some cases voice) service.

This latest outage is just one of a series of failures that really aren't good enough for a service that is so critical to the lives and income of so many people.

So does it make sense to build a single broadband network when such a configuration introduces so many single points of failure?

The internet isn't like other key infrastructure services either.

If the power goes out you can always wheel out the generator you bought back at the turn of the century when Auckland's power cables were blown to snot -- and generate your own.

When your landlines spit the dummy and produce nothing but silence, you can always switch to your mobile phones and carry on.

But, when your DSL connection goes belly-up and you're a business or hard-core Net-user you're pretty stuffed.

Yes, you could plug in a USB cellular modem but you'd probably need to tweak a few network configuration settings and if you run an in-house mailserver you'd probably still find you were "off the air" in respect to much of your communications.

And then there's the cost...

DSL broadband is far, far cheaper than a cellular-based service so any business switching to such an alternative will probably find a huge bill awaiting them next time Vodafone or Telecom were in touch.

I know that whenever my landline phone goes out, Telecom usually offer to redirect my incoming calls to my mobile free of charge (how nice) but they've yet to offer free cellular internet access when my DSL connection plays up. Why not?

Right now I'm wondering what will happen if Telecom (or any other company) is given the task of building a single nation-wide broadband network and things break (as they inevitably do)?

Where's the fallback service? Where is the contingency planning for mitigating the effects of a major cable, router or other failure?

If we're going to make ourselves so dependent on a single source of supply for our hi-speed data services then they better be pretty damned good and there'd better be some very impressive "mean time to repair" figures offered.

Telecom has proven that it's having increasing difficulty keeping its existing network up for 24/7 so how would they manage something bigger, faster and more ubiquitous I wonder?

Do we need to sit down, have a cup of tea and a good long think before we role out an NBN with no real fall-back capabilities in case of disaster or catastrophic systems failure?

Should Telecom have some kind of prepared strategy (such as providing free cellular internet) for companies that are knocked off the Net by failures in its network?

Might it not be a smart idea to have *two* national broadband networks, each operated by a separate entity so as to provide at least some illusion of competition and to ensure a degree of redundancy and resilience?

Remember, a lot of it is going to be your money so you deserve a say.

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