Australia’s National Broadband Network Business Plan Released

The Patentology blog is – appropriately enough – primarily about patents, law and practice.  But patents (or, at least, those patents worth having) are essentially incentives for, and by-products of, innovation.  And we believe that innovation will only happen effectively and efficiently when supported by appropriate infrastructure.

This is why we think that Australia’s proposed National Broadband Network (NBN) is an important project.  It is why we identified broadband policy as the major innovation-related issue in the recent federal election, and why we agreed substantially with the views expressed by Jonathan Coppel (Economic Counsellor to the OECD Secretary General) when he said back in September that:

Good infrastructure facilitates trade, bolsters market integration and competition, fosters the dissemination of ideas and innovation and enhances access to resources and public services. These benefits are particularly important for Australia because of its size, geographical dispersion of the population and production centres and distance from other major markets.

Australia cannot rely upon open competition to deliver universal access to quality broadband service, because there are vast areas of the continent where it is simply not profitable to deliver such a service at prices that are affordable to the local communities.  Additionally, a population of 22 million people cannot reasonably afford to pay for duplication of expensive infrastructure in order to facilitate ‘competition’ in those geographic areas where there are substantial profits to be made.

THE NATIONAL BROADBAND NETWORK

The solution devised by the present government is to regulate the construction and operation of a single, primarily optical-fibre-based, network by an initially government-owned and taxpayer-funded company, NBNCo Limited.  The network will be wholesale only, meaning that its capacity will be sold into a competitive market of retail service providers (e.g. telcos and ISPs).  All of the retail providers will pay the same wholesale rates, throughout Australia, and will be able to compete for customers on the basis of retail pricing and service offerings.

(For the more technically-minded, the NBN will provide a layer-2 service, with the major access infrastructure being GPON fibre-to-the-premises.)

THE BUSINESS PLAN

With the release earlier this week of the full NBNCo business plan, we now have a better picture of how the network will be deployed and operated over the next 30 years, and where tens of billions of taxpayer dollars will be spent on the single largest nation building infrastructure project in Australian history.

Highlights of the business plan are:

1. $35.9bn total capital expenditure
2. 93 per cent of homes, schools and workplaces to be connected with speeds of up to one gigabit per second
3. $27.5bn government investment
4. $13.4bn capital raising from 2015
5. Wholesale cost for 12 megabits per second (mbps) download, one mbps upload, including telephone – $24 a month
6. Likely range of retail charges – $53-$58 a month

The network will be constructed over a nine-and-a-half year period, with key milestones including:

1. April 2011 – start of mainland user trials
2. June 2011 – satellite services to remote locations start
3. September 2011 – first retail deals
4. 2015 – long-term satellite services start
5. 2021 – project completion

We look forward to a stimulating period in Australia’s development.

---

Before You Go…

Thank you for reading this article to the end – I hope you enjoyed it, and found it useful.  Almost every article I post here takes a few hours of my time to research and write, and I have never felt the need to ask for anything in return.

But now – for the first, and perhaps only, time – I am asking for a favour.  If you are a patent attorney, examiner, or other professional who is experienced in reading and interpreting patent claims, I could really use your help with my PhD research.  My project involves applying artificial intelligence to analyse patent claim scope systematically, with the goal of better understanding how different legal and regulatory choices influence the boundaries of patent protection.  But I need data to train my models, and that is where you can potentially assist me.  If every qualified person who reads this request could spare just a couple of hours over the next few weeks, I could gather all the data I need.

The task itself is straightforward and web-based – I am asking participants to compare pairs of patent claims and evaluate their relative scope, using an online application that I have designed and implemented over the past few months.  No special knowledge is required beyond the ability to read and understand patent claims in technical fields with which you are familiar.  You might even find it to be fun!

There is more information on the project website, at claimscopeproject.net.  In particular, you can read:

1. a detailed description of the study, its goals and benefits; and
2. instructions for the use of the online claim comparison application.

Thank you for considering this request!

Mark Summerfield

Tags: Australia, Broadband, Innovation policy