Letter to local Member of Parliament re the NBN

Australia has a Federal election in just a few weeks days. One of the recent policy decisions by the Opposition (Liberal Party) is to kill the Labor Party’s National Broadband Network (fiber optic), currently being rolled out in test areas of the country. The NBN promises a minimum of 100 mbps speed to 93% of Australia’s population, with no competing for available bandwidth with your neighbors.

I rarely feel strongly about any election issue, but this one has really got me fired up as it is the one that affects me most directly. So fired up, in fact, that I emailed the local Member of Parliament (she represents the Liberal Party) about it. Here’s my letter (slightly edited to remove identifying information about clients etc.). (BTW, as at 17 August 2010, the local MP I addressed this email to has not even given me the courtesy of an automated response; I finally got a reply from her office [not her] on 24 August, which said “Thank you for your email outlining your concerns. Rhonda.” That’s it!)

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As a newcomer to your electorate, I’d like to voice my concern and dismay over the Liberal Party’s stance on the National Broadband Network. This is SUCH an issue for me that I will NOT vote Liberal while the party promises to kill the NBN, as promoted by Tony Abbott in recent days.

I’ve been living in regional Western Australia for the past 3.5 years, having moved to the southwest from Perth. I currently work on the […] Project from home. I do all my work remotely.

Internet connection is critical for me to run my business as I am continually transferring large documents (300+ page Word documents and large GIS images, for example) to and from [client]’s servers, which are located around the world. Prior to working on the […] Project, I’ve worked remotely for resource companies in Queensland, software companies in Perth, and clients in Israel and the US — again, all from my home in southwest WA.

My internet connection is patchy at best. Speed and bandwidth is a real issue. Even though I pay for and am meant to get up to 8 mbps download speed, on most days I get an average of 3 mbps (on very lucky days I get 4 to 6 mbps download speed). Upload speed is hellishly slow (about 0.3 mbps most days; occasionally 0.1 mbps or less). To give you some idea of what that means to my productivity, it can take 90 minutes to upload a large document back to [client] — I can drive to Perth in that time! I can’t work on documents directly over the internet as the connection is slow and unreliable — I have to download documents to my computer, work on them locally, then upload them back to [client] and cross my fingers that the connection won’t drop out while I’m doing so (if it does, I have to start all over again — it has taken me over five hours to upload one document because I had to restart it several times as a result of a flaky connection that dropped out halfway through the upload).

There are several reasons for this slow and unreliable connection:

• Telephone exchanges not having sufficient capacity for all those who want access.
• Living too far from a telephone exchange (about 3 to 5 km is the limit), so therefore sub exchanges are used for an area – this slows things down a lot. We’re 8 km from the closest exchange, so we’re on a sub exchange, even though we’re less than 20 km from [major town].
• The sub exchange divides up the available bandwidth according to how many people are accessing the internet at one time. Think of it as a cake — if you have 4 people, everyone gets a big slice of the cake, but if you have 30 people, everyone gets a very thin slice of the cake. If you have 50 or 100 people, the slices become even thinner. There’s only one cake.
• Regional Australia, in the main, has an unrealistic and inequitable limit on internet speed. For much of regional Australia, it’s 1.5 mbps; for some areas, such as [major town], it’s 8 mbps. Perth gets 24 mbps — 3 times the speed; Sydney and Melbourne, where they have cable in some areas, get much greater speeds. Regional Australia gets treated like a 3rd class citizen when it comes to internet speed. Why should we have to live in a major city to get decent internet speed?
• The aging copper wire is subject to faults, breakages, disconnections, water damage etc. Telstra is slow and reluctant to fix intermittent problems (in [small town] where we lived prior to moving closer to [major town], we had a problem with water in the Telstra pit at the end of the street. The technician did a patch job, but in the 3 years we were there, this was never fixed.)

The NBN promises direct connection at speeds that I can’t even conceive of, with no sharing of the bandwidth with neighbors, the ability to download and upload large files in seconds instead of hours, the ability to work directly on documents on my client’s servers (as though I was there) instead of risking their security and confidentiality by downloading documents to my computer.

With the NBN, Australia finally has an opportunity to compete with the world and to save valuable resources. For every person who can work from home, as I can, there are enormous savings — no commuting; greater individual productivity; less need for businesses to provide dedicated office space for every employee; money freed up to go back into the economy because of not needing to pay for fuel, parking, business attire; etc.

The NBN is not about the ability to download movies, music, and TV shows — it’s about creating a more productive Australian workforce and business sector.

The solution proposed by the Liberal Party is just more of the same, though slightly faster — maybe. And it’s not good enough.

I will not vote Liberal while it wants to keep this great country in the dark ages as far as internet connection goes. You are holding back every business — large and small — that just wants to get their work done as efficiently and quickly as possible.

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See also these other blog posts on my internet connection experiences:

• Internet speeds: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/internet-speeds/
• Telstra user experience fail (re internet connection): https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/telstra-user-experience-fail/
• Internet connection: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2007/07/24/internet-connection/

And for the last word on the Liberal’s policy on the NBN:

[Links last checked August 2010; thanks to Peter M for alerting me to the YouTube video]