Just who will pay for the NSW Government’s proposal to give free Wi-Fi broadband Internet to a handful of city centres, most in metropolitan areas?A report on the offer of free wi-fi wireless broadband sounds very nice, but who is paying for it, and what quality of service can anyone expect?
Especially around election times, with the NSW Government due for an election in 2007, governments like to make bold promises or launch stunning initiatives which are either disregarded after an election win, or scaled back to become something else.
This isn’t always the case, of course, but no matter where you’re reading this right now, I’m sure you can remember big announcements or promises that, in the end, either didn’t happen or were significantly changed.
In what smells like a bit of electioneering, the NSW Government is offering free wireless broadband across all of Sydney’s CBD, including North Sydney, and is also promising free wireless broadband in the city centres of Liverpool, Parramatta, Wollongong, Newcastle and Gosford.
However this leaves out the major regional centres of Dubbo, Wagga Wagga, Armidale, Tamworth, Orange, the North Coast, Albury, Bathurst, Tweed and other areas, most of which have had no wireless “broadband” until Telstra’s recent Next-G service, unlike the metropolitan centres which often have iBurst, Unwired or other wireless services on offer.
I originally stated in this article that those areas had no wireless broadband whatsoever, but Telstra have been in contact to remind me of their Next-G service which now allow access to wireless broadband in those areas. Before Telstra’s Next-G service arrived only a few weeks ago in those regional centres, the fastest wireless speeds on offer were either GPRS or Telstra’s CDMA 1xRTT service which was only able to give an approximate 100k connection speed (which could fluctuate up or down depending on your signal strength).
Now that Next-G is available, consumers and businesses can indeed get wireless broadband in those areas, but while the pricing is more easily affordable by businesses, consumers could baulk at paying approximately $100 per month for a 1Gb download limit, or $199 for a 3Gb download limit.
It is expected that Telstra will, before Christmas, announce a Next-G service using desktop modems, similar to Telstra’s existing CDMA EVDO desktop modems, at similar prices which are more affordable that the existing Next-G pricing – but this is yet to be officially announced or confirmed.
Tesltra’s Next-G obviously won’t be a free service as the NSW Government is proposing for metropolitan areas, and clearly Tesltra are concerned that any free government subsidised service will eat into their profits as any existing business would be when the government suggests it will offer a service that is already commercially provided on a free of charge basis.
So, while Telstra has finally made wireless broadband available in those regional centres, with the expectation of better prices for consumers, it is the only telco/ISP to do so, and those centres have been curiously left out of the NSW Government’s otherwise generous sounding agenda of free Wi-Fi for the selected masses.
These regional centres would probably benefit a great deal more than city areas with access to wireless broadband, with metropolitan cities already flooded with an enormous array of wireless choices. My original point about these regional centres was that they are being left out of the NSW Government’s flawed free Wi-Fi proposal for no good reason other than perhaps politics, seeing as they are seemingly happy to fund free wireless Wi-Fi for metropolitan areas.
In an age of privatisation, why is the NSW Government offering free wireless broadband at all? The NSW Premier, Morris Iemma, said that “Universal access to wireless broadband in our CBDs will further boost the state’s economy and make NSW more attractive for expanding or new businesses.”
While that sounds positively delightful, does Mr Iemma really know what he is getting himself in for? To start with, the NSW Government has now decided it is going to be an Internet Service Provider to compete with publicly run companies.
But here are some other questions:
- Will the government be filtering the service to protect children who access it from inappropriate and dangerous sites on the Internet?
- Will the government be blocking, shaping or applying QoS to certain types of traffic, such as peer-to-peer, VoIP traffic, streaming media and more?
- What speed will the service be offered at? How secure is the network? Does it protect users from online fraud, identity theft and other online criminal behaviour?
- What provisions are there to restore service quickly in the event of a service interruption?
- Who is paying for the service, and how much is it expected to cost?
- Will advertising really be enough to pay for the service, and what kind of sacrifices will we have to make to our Internet experience to see the ads that will pay for the service?
- What protections will the government make against pirates using the network to download copyright protected software and digital media, or using the network to upload and share such materials with others?
- Will the government be individually monitoring users on the network?
- What guarantees can the government give to companies that the network is reliable and secure, seeing as it wants to make NSW more attractive for expanding or new businesses?
- What service provisions, help desks or other support numbers are available should users have difficulty connecting to the network?
- What will the government do if the network is flooded by freeloaders who overload the network, slowing it down tremendously and making it more painful to use as time goes by?
- What protections is the government taking to ensure its network is not a conduit for spammers, illegal bot network operators or other illegal online behaviour that will try to be masked via someone using a brand new laptop computer with no identifying materials on it who is connecting to the free wireless network?
- What will the government do if existing ISPs and Australia’s Internet Industry Association protest against this action? No such protests have yet taken place and we have no idea of their intentions. But as their businesses will be materially affected by this unilateral government action, we can only but wonder.
A lot of questions need to be answered about this wireless network, otherwise it could easily become a clogged, congested, insecure network that no individual or business in their right mind would want to risk using.
Governments often have grand plans, but often don’t follow through properly or at all.
Before we can make any final judgement, we need to see more detail, but when was the last time you really had any faith in the never ending stream of whiz-bang announcements and schemes that governments dream up?
The NSW Government should forget about becoming a provider of free ISP services and concentrate on being a good government that looks after the roads, the healthcare system, law and order and delivering on existing promises.
Personally, I don’t have an issue with this scheme, as governments are just as capable of running a business as the private sector. There are certainly benefits that arise from public operations vs private ones, for example, look how the banking sector has changed post CBA’s privatisation.
Such services have also been offered in other cities overseas, such as Paris, and it becomes much more pleasant for the traveller to be assured they will readily have access to internet, just as there used to be a public telephone readily available (until displaced by mobile connectivity).
While it is free now, if indeed it became a burden with freeloaders, then it could be charged for just as telephony is, but at least with the assurance that the service would be readily available. However, as with public transport, and public telephones, pricing would be regulated much easier than when private companies cherry-pick territory to suit them, and price accordingly as well.
Hi Manfred,
I’m not sure Government should be running ANY of these things other than a defence force and a police force. The rest is just things that government decided to tack on to justify their existence and their taxes. Now that we have these things they are hard to dismantle and few would want that to happen – it’s the system we are living in, after all. But I am not for Government starting up yet more enterprises at taxpayer expense. Read up on some Libertarian literature and Austrian Economics if you’d like more information.
Anyway… this is just my opinion. Clearly the government will do what it likes. But I can voice my personal disapproval of the whole scheme. Taxpayers do not need their money wasted on yet more ‘schemes’ when the basics that government already meddles in, like schools, public transport, law and order, hospitals and roads, are in the worst shape they’ve ever been in.
Fix those things first, and they maybe we can talk about setting up free wi-fi for the entire planet. But until then… announcements like this, even if surrounded in sweet sounding objectives like ‘bringing more business to NSW’ are just election bribes and distractions. If they are not, what are they? Promises, promises, promises that you, I and everyone else are paying for.
If you need wireless broadband, pay for it yourself! Don’t expect the government to just hand it out. Otherwise you’ll be expecting the government to hand out everything. When will the expectation that governments should just hand out freebies end? At this rate, never. Up go your taxes, stamp duties, rates, charges, levies, fees, license costs etc etc etc.
If we are paying for these things through taxes, fees etc to the government, why not let private enterprise run it instead? We can pay the same money to them and, in theory, get much better service than any government can provide.
This is clearly a philosophical argument about the merits of what governments should and shouldn’t do. My thoughts are that governments should do as little as possible. Expanding governments only encroach on people’s lives and freedoms. And create bigger budget deficits with every unfunded promise.
Want wireless broadband? Pay for it. Don’t expect the rest of us to subsidise it!