IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

"We have been frustrated over plans to deliver world-class broadband to 97 per cent of the population," National Rural Health Alliance chairwoman Jennifer May has told an inquiry into the NBN.

"For us, the missing 3 per cent -- those who live in quite remote and poor reception areas -- provide the real test.

The slow roll out of the National Broadband Network is contributing an ongoing digital literacy deficit across Australia, especially in telehealth, according to speakers at the Connected Australia event in Sydney.

“There's a lot of up-skilling to do, in particular at the home end or recipient end of healthcare. There's a notion of build it and they will come: If you don't have the NBN, you won't generate the digital literacy to maximise the use of it. So it's a little like chicken and egg,” said Professor Colin Carati, associate head of ICT at Flinders University.

An information resource to help councils in areas of Australia that are not located in the National Broadband Network (NBN) test sites needs to be created in order for them to prepare and learn from other councils' experiences, according to a visiting broadband expert.

UK-based, Dr Tim Williams, was in Australia to present a white paper called "Connecting Communities: The impact of broadband on communities in the UK and its implications for Australia<" to the Federal Government’s Regional Telecommunications Independent Review Committee.

Mr Bailey said technology was providing people with better access to medical specialists each day, but faster internet speeds would improve health outcomes even further.

He said the Federal Government had already introduced incentives for health practitioners to embrace technology and consult via the internet.

The National E-Health Transition Authority, formed in 2005 by the Council of Australian Governments to bring unity to e-health development, can be likened to the 20th-century push to standardise Australia's rail gauges. Doing things in a standard way unlocks the potential of the developments taking place across the nation and ends the current situation of multiple technologies that cannot talk to each other.

Why the need for electronic records? They were recommended by the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, which recognised that to keep costs contained and the system sustainable the health system must work in a better way. Costs and demand may be rising, but technology is the health system's get-out-of-jail card.

Many Australian businesses have bought into the benefits video conferencing can deliver. Based on Ovum research, a third of businesses are already using professional, business- grade video conferencing services, with an additional 34 per cent expecting to use it in the next 12 months.

The ABC has obtained figures showing the network had passed 32,000 premises in the state in August, with no progress since.

Dean Winter from Tas ICT says the Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull needs to get things moving again, quickly.

Ms Giddings said NBN Co was ultimately responsible for the roll-out of the NBN and would determine the timetable for the further expansion of the network in Tasmania.

“We know that Tasmanian communities want to have access to fast and affordable broadband and I would encourage the Federal Government to act quickly to commence the second stage of the roll-out,” Ms Giddings said.

Of all of the many promises the NBN is supposed to fulfill, its role in the delivery of electronic health is probably the most contentious.

Society has a very real problem of escalating health costs for services struggling to meet the increasing burden of ageing, chronic disease and obesity. Alongside this is the promise of improved efficiencies brought about by computerisation and faster broadband networks.

One of the core principles of belief in why Australia needs to deploy a full fibre-to-the-premises (FttP) National Broadband Network (NBN) across the country is telehealth. However, in a panel session that should give FttP proponents nightmares, a quartet of health experts have identified the issues with increasing the use of telehealth as being cultural and operational, not bound by the speed of a data connection.

Over the weekend, a joint ministerial statement announced a further $20.6 million to fund pilot projects, in areas where the NBN has already been rolled out, which demonstrate how in-home technology can improve aged care, palliative care and cancer care.

The NBN will be a boon to Australian healthcare regardless of which political party has its way on the final technology approach for delivery, officials from health IT vendors said at a lunch in Sydney.

The officials indicated that either the Labor party’s fibre-to-the-premises or the Coalition’s fibre-to-the-node plan could offer the minimum speeds and reliability levels required by telehealth and other bandwidth-intensive health IT activities.

The Digital Economy Strategy, recently announced at ceBIT Australia 2011, has been warmly received by the industry. But analysts are less certain of the strategy.

When Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy, lifted the curtains on the elusive Digital Economy Strategy at CeBit 2011 in late May, the response was overwhelmingly positive.

The strategy contains eight ambitious goals for Australia to achieve with the help of high-speed broadband by 2020. These include pushing Australia into the top five OECD countries with households connected to broadband, doubling the level of workers that telecommunicate and closing the gap between businesses in capital cities and those in regional areas.

The infrastructure that is now being built offers a range of features such as ubiquitousness, affordability, low latency, high speed and high capacity. It will link millions of devices, such as sensors, that will enable us to more efficiently and effectively manage our environment, traffic, infrastructures, and our society as a whole.

Yet it is also one of the most inefficient. Only because our health is so important do we tolerate levels of service that would be totally unacceptable in other industries. One just has to look at waiting rooms where people are left sitting for hours before they are attended to; making more efficient appointments is in most cases not an option.

At the same time it is still one of the most closed industries. It is heavily dominated by a large number of silos which are not known for their cross-sector cooperation; and often there are very serious political battles between medical groups. These activities have devalued improvements for decades.

The National Broadband Network (NBN) is set to transform a wide range of industries with the availability of next-generation applications over the next decade.

While the health and education sectors are being touted as early beneficiaries of the network there are a range of other industries set to be transformed.

It started with the music industry, followed by the publishing industry. The retail sector is learning its lessons the hard way but it is now beginning to understand the new environment. The entertainment industry is still trying to stop the tsunami by employing armies of lawyers, but it will soon also be engulfed by the changes. The banking sector is making a much smoother transition, while the demise of Kodak is another example of ‘missing the boat’.

Several things became clear during the privatisation process of Telstra in the last decade. Broadband quality was below the international benchmark, end-user and wholesale prices were above that mark and there was no economically viable business case for high-speed broadband infrastructure for regional and rural Australia.

Coinciding with the debate around these issues was the arrival of the GFC and the government’s decision to change its broadband infrastructure plan from a regional to a national one. It also linked that to the development of the digital economy and launched supporting policies in e-commerce, e-health, e-education and smart grid, all aimed at utilising the NBN for those purposes.

Ask Rod Tucker what he'd like to do with the high speeds and ubiquitous connectivity offered by the national broadband network (NBN), and he's full of ideas. Of course, that's his job: as director of the Institute for a Broadband Enabled Society(IBES) think-tank at the University of Melbourne, Professor Tucker and his team of thinkers are eagerly working to substantiate the use cases for the country's biggest infrastructure project.

Of these applications, one of the most critical is e-health, which promises to reduce the cost of healthcare while improving access to health services for all Australians, regardless of location.

The risks, and need for diligence around implementing e-health systems, are high in light of recent failures both locally and overseas.