Di Martin: But as Phil Dobbie discovered for himself the other day, the poor old copper wires, laid more than a century ago, are on their last legs.

Phil Dobbie: We had builders out the other day outside the front of our house, digging up the road. And I, just out of interest, said, ‘Well, seeing as you’ve got a ditch there, let’s have a look and see what my telephone line looks like.’ I’m that sort of crazy person, you know. So I had a look, and you know, it’s just – only the duct was decaying, and it’s just this little line, and there was water dropping through it.

Di Martin: It really colours in the picture of the ageing copper wires doesn’t it?

Phil Dobbie: I should have taken a photograph actually, because it is a sight to behold. This is Australia’s broadband future in a ditch.

So that’s how ADSL2 is coming to the older suburbs. They are better off than some of the newer suburbs, where some speeds are slower than dial-up. Recently there was a fascinating segment on Kelly Higgins-Devine’s Drive program on local radio here.

First, she had two experts on a panel. They both agreed that fibre to the home was a stable and scalable technology and the only real option for a modern broadband system. Certainly it was the technology of choice around the world.

They said that wireless, by contrast, was unstable and consumers would possibly need to change modems and routers every few years. So for them the choice of national system was very clear and since there was no alternative view being put the discussion moved to what is now a widespread and excruciating problem.

The situation is this. Very simply Telstra has not upgraded the local exchanges to cope with new real estate developments. So you have a diabolical choke in the system. You can be sold new fast ADSL plans or whatever, but they simply won’t happen if the copper network can’t handle the traffic.

This was followed by callers of two categories. First, a number of people in the business of providing or servicing internet access by consumers, who confirmed what the experts were saying.

Secondly, a string of consumers who had experienced problems. One from Carindale, only about 10km from the Brisbane GPO as the crow flies, but new. He had broadband slower than dial-up. Another moved from the old Ipswich suburb of Brassall down the road to Collingwood Park. Suddenly he had daughters complaining that they had no life because they couldn’t get onto the net. It cost him an extra $900 pa on top of his plan for a wireless connection.

There were many more callers, all in furious agreement.

I have a Telstra cable connection, but it has been strung along the light poles. Mostly it works, but not always. My (limited) understanding is that it works reasonably well because not too many people in the street who actually use it. And the demands I make on it are very limited.

So the present system is a mess.

It seems reasonable to me to cost a replacement over 20 years. If you spread $43 billion over 20 years it comes to $1.90 per person per week. If you cost it as tax payers over eight years it comes in at about $8.60 per week.

I’d like someone to do some serious costing on the Coalition’s broadband future scenario, but I suspect that it would be more expensive in actual dollars, and as value for money it would be a sick joke. Moreover, before we were 20 years down the road we’d almost certainly decide that FTTH was the way to go.

Today I heard about a Malaysian man who chose to live in Australia because of our technological advancement. Now he’s pissed because his mother in Kuala Lumpur has FTTH before he does.

Conroy said originally that if business wanted the NBN they would have to sell it. Now his boss is trying to sell it through applications in health.

Nicola Roxon did a fair job of it yesterday, explaining the $392 million initiative announced in the Labor launch.

On Australia Talks on Monday night Dr Tori Wade, a GP and psychologist, who is completing her PhD in public health at the University of Adelaide, and an advisor to the Adelaide Western General Practice Network, explained how tele-medicine was already working on her patch. For what she was doing, superfast broadband would help, but was not essential. It would help, of course, in what they were doing now. She wasn’t talking about what they might do if better technology were available. One of the callers was from the University of Queensland, where similar practices were in train.

Yesterday John Dwyer had this to say:

The rollout of a really fast broadband network is really crucial if the technology is to be able to do the sort of things that the Prime Minister was describing yesterday.

But it just so happens I was talking at a conference in Melbourne yesterday on healthcare reform, and there was a number of experts telling us what’s going on around the world with e-health. And the evidence base that it’s cost effective, that it is probably the most single miraculous way of rapidly reducing medical errors.

The data is absolutely crystal clear and the public acceptance in Scandinavia, in Germany, in Italy, in so many places, and the benefits that have flowed are just there for all to see.

But it does require the infrastructure that we don’t have at the moment. If you’re really going to look at an angiogram in real time, in moving pictures, so that some expert in Sydney can look at something that was done by [a] technician in the rural areas, you’ve got to have the quality so that the person can make the judgement.

I can tell you that through the leadership of this man there were trials of tele-medicine back in the 1980s. We were probably leading the world at that stage. It is a fact that back then Roy Lundin hired a van and led a tour through the US of A demonstrating the use of telecommunications in a number of professions.

In Queensland we started with professional development for teacher-librarians, Roy’s original core business, where about 150 people spread in nodes around the state were connected and interacted for a few hours every so often.

The technology was a bit clunky, but the brilliance was in the educational design, the pre and post experiences and the structuring of the whole event. Training people in the necessary techniques and methodologies is part of what the $392m is for.

Sadly, Roy is no longer with us, he was a couple of years older than I am and died too young. If he were alive today he’d be in heaven.

When I worked in the Department of Education I had oversight of the introduction and support of all manner of curriculum resources into schools, including traditional books, but also microcomputers, films, videos, everything. We had a full film and TV production studio, and also produced software packages. I chaired the committee that set up the contracts for the purchase of computers by schools.

I was in this position in large part, I think, to provide a buffer between the technology nerds and the senior directors. I can’t remember how many times I was told that the world had changed forever.

Early innovations in ICT were a bit underwhelming, IMHO. One major breakthrough was the combination of full-text storage and the internet. Fast broadband available to school will obviously enhance these functions.

But for the next step every kid needs a computer and reliable access to the internet at home. There are also possibilities of clusters of small secondary schools offering subjects on a shared basis that they simply couldn’t contemplate separately.

But I’m not the ideas man. If my mate Roy were here, ideas and possibilities would be bursting out all over, together with practical strategies for implementation. He was that kind of guy. He was irreplaceable for those who knew him, but now there is a broad skill base in the country ready to take up the challenge.

For me, I’ve never seen a cleaner, clearer chance to take a quantum leap in in technology applications presented as a rational choice. Ubiquity and equity are important, as is the structural separation of Telstra. The last thing we need is competing interests in the provision of infrastructure becoming vested interests against change towards coherent universality.

I would humbly submit that we have reached a fork in the road. Either we dig a ditch and install a gold standard broadband future, or figuratively our future lies in a ditch.

Our most recent post on the topic is here and from there you will find links to earlier posts.

Update: Here’s an account of a Parliamentary Library analysis of costing.