Procurement Professional is the official publication of CIPS Australasia

#118 - National Broadband: The forty three billion dollar question:

26 Feb 2010

The forty three billion dollar question is a very simple one:  Will the national broadband product, when it is finished, actually be better, faster and cheaper than competitors’ products?

After all, it is at least five to eight years away – and much happens in technology over such a timeline. Moore’s law for instance – that computing memory capacity & processing speed double every year.

An interesting change of events suggests Telstra will be selling us the NBN in the future, as the primary distributor? But maybe other competitors will have a better claim by then? They may perhaps include Optus and the other spurned bidders from the original tender, possibly – Acacia, Axia or TransAct. But, by then, mobile operators like Hutchinson & Vodafone may be competing with a wireless 3G+ offers perhaps, or better? Even Foxtel, iiNet or i Primus may have offers of some description wither as carriers or providers? Or AT&T in the USA who offered a launch package for users of the new i Pad in cahoots with Apple recently? Or, crucially, Google. Who recently announced plans for a super fast wireless wide area broadband [wi-fi] service for the USA that is planned to be ten times faster than the Australian national broadband that is currently planned. Alan Kohler at ABC explains it all  http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/15/2819334.htm?site=thedrum and the Andrew Bolt blog comments on it lucidly....  http://blogs.news.com.au/couriermail/andrewbolt/index.php/couriermail/P60/

Stephen Conroy, the federal minister of communications may just have bitten off more than he can chew? And as fast as the new procurement team at NBN Co can buy hardware, processing speeds will be going up. Sounds a lot like a hiding to nothing. For the consumer it may come down to price. Possibly the only way NBN can compete in future, by offering a cheaper – or free – service, which may be slower, but has other benefits?

Which means minimising costs from the outset could be a good idea – with a pretty sharp strategic procurement team and some far-sighted telecoms experts to aid them. Good luck lads.

The Buyer – posted 26 February 2010

The views of THE BUYER are personal and are not necessarily those of Procurement Professional magazine, BTTB Marketing nor CIPS