Thomas Karpiniec

The digital economy includes all activity on the Internet, but it's a moving target. For example, current activities for consumers are online banking, shopping on eBay or Amazon, chatting with family/friends through instant messenger services or social networking sites, email and purchasing music. There are also the business consumers who want email hosting, websites, coordinated calendar services and secure VPNs between different physical locations.

These are going to change. One only has to observe the huge growth of Youtube to see that the Internet is fast becoming a platform for delivery of all types of multimedia content. It is now a simple matter to purchase electronic copies of movies and TV shows and download them directly. Consumers as well as businesses are getting more interested in video conferencing.

None of these new things are going to work very well in Australia because large amounts of bandwidth are required. The cheapest Telstra plans give you less than a single gigabyte of data to use each month. One or two movies and that's gone, never mind anything else you want to do. Only when you're using a different ISP and paying upwards of about $80/mo do you get a combination of reasonable speed and a reasonable download limit.

A few years ago I was speaking to a friend in the United States about his Internet connection. He was paying the equivalent of $AU20/mo for about 4Mb/s downloads (that's megabit) and 1Mb/s uploads and hadn't even heard of a "download quota". It is nothing more than a marketing tool to make the consumer feel like bandwidth is a special commodity so that telecom companies can skimp on infrastructure. Australian users need fast downloads and uploads without limits to take full advantage of these newer technologies.

There is a flip side too: the hosting companies. I rent a personal virtualised server and not so long ago changed from one in the US to one in Australia. The one in the US cost me $US20/mo, gave me 10GB hard drive space and 100GB bandwidth every month. The Australian one costs me $AU35/mo, gives me 10GB of hard drive space and 10GB bandwidth. I made the change because I wanted lower latency, wasn't using the bandwidth and wanted to support the company's attempts to survive in the Australian server market. If I was a company which wanted to host clients' websites though, I would absolutely have to get the one in the US for economical reasons. As much as the US economy needs a boost right now, I would like to see the dollars stay in Australia.

As a Government you don't have a long list of things to do, to be honest. The Internet will do its own thing: businesses will be built and the effects will improve Australia's economy. What you have to do is get the expensive infrastructure monopoly out of the way, get us the bandwidth, get us the value for money, not mess it all up with a filter and we can get our work done. Not an easy task, I'll admit, but that's all we need.