What's over that horizon?

[morsla]

I've just been asked to take part in a discussion panel at the CRC conference. Most of the people present will be industry, university and government partners (it's after most of the students have been sent home), and the panel will mainly be composed of industry people from places like Telstra Business. I'm the token student on the panel...

The panel is called 'Fibre to the Home' and is about the National Broadband Network. It's all about personal perspectives on the NBN, so my background is as a small business owner and a consumer.

I'd like to pick your brains, though - if anyone would like to put their futurist thinking cap on...

- What would you want to do with dramatically faster broadband?

- What do you think would change, from the things you currently do?

- What currently unavailable things would you like to do?

It's a brainstorming session. We know that work is underway to provide much better internet access in Australia. We know that government and big business are excited about it. We don't really know what consumers and small businesses would do with it.

I'm confident that people (particularly games developers) will find a way to use any available technology. I'd really like to speculate on what some of those new uses might be.

Comments

[kirby1024.livejournal.com]

High-def video on demand'd be a big one. Also, consequentially, video conferencing and video calling would be much more effective. It'd also open up possibilities for internet hard drives that aren't currently worth it, but would certainly be useful for later (I mean, I'd enjoy being able to put large files in readily-accessible storage that's accessible at very good speeds wherever there's an internet connection).

Also, personally, it makes things like gaming so much easier and enjoyable (high ping rates make gamers happy!). It also allows geekier consumers to manage their own web servers at decent speeds, which'd be a serious plus for those consumers.

[morsla.livejournal.com]

Communication is a huge thing for small business, and something I think the NBN can help with. When you have a handful of people in the company you have a fairly limited internal pool of expertise to draw on - so you need to establish good networks outside the business.

Improving video calling would be very handy for all the jobs where face-to-face meetups aren't cost-effective, but are still vital for dealing with clients.

I hadn't considered internet hard drives before - though I can certainly see a use for them, once we can move data around fast enough.

[kirby1024.livejournal.com]

On the video call note, a few extra stories:

1) When they were training me at Telstra, they told the story of a travelling businessman who specifically bought two video-call capable phones, one for him, and one for his little daughter, because he wanted his daughter to see him once a day, every day, even if he was away. Apparently he tucked her in at night through the phone with the mother present.

That's the kind of really serious connection that video-calling can provide. A lot of elderly customers of Telstra are the highest users of video-calling, because it meant that they could see their children and their grandchildren a whole lot more often, even if they lived in remote areas - it was such a fantastic way of reducing the feeling of isolation a lot of the elderly face.

2) Another big major thang that video-calls are useful for - deaf people. While there are TTYs out there, and SMS is plenty useful, video-calling gives a way for sign-language users to communicate simply and easily with each other in their native language. With vid-call quality right now, it's a bit difficult to use, but with extended bandwith? Think of the benefits to deaf users, or other people with verbal issues.

These things are available now, on mobile networks, but imagine if we could set things up so that there was a land-based high-def video-phone network? We're almost there as it is, build a truly fast NBN and it becomes pretty much a cinch - and the capacity to connect with a visual image of the person you're talking to is a really powerful argument for the increase of bandwith.

What would you want to do with dramatically faster broadband?

[harkon.livejournal.com]

I'd want to start watching "TV" shows again. Basically the content generated by the podcasts/vodcasts/streams that I want to watch cannot be serviced by the bandwidth I have available (albeit mine is rather crappy). This means I have to be more selective with what I consume (which ultimately might be a good thing when considering productivity ), but I know there is a lot of stuff that I don't even try because I know I would have to not download something else.

I already do a fair bit of stuff online, but with good bandwidth the thing that I would start doing is more online gaming. At the moment, given the amount of stuff we download, gaming isn't really something I do very much. Given arbitrarily large internet speed, I'd be able to do more of both up to the point where I run into other limitations (such as hardware).

Finally, I might dabble with some projects that require a decent upload capability. Creating video content is now something an enthusiast can do, but with poor internet speed, uploading the content to a host is a bit of a pain.

What do you think would change, from the things you currently do?

[harkon.livejournal.com]

I'd probably become more internet connected, which is a little scary. At the moment we have computers equal to the number of family members, but if I had more things I wanted to do on the internet, I'd set up more the hardware to use it.

If I had the bandwidth, the amount of HD content I'd want would probably justify investment in a bunch of stuff to view and maybe a few knickknacks for content creation.

What currently unavailable things would you like to do?

[harkon.livejournal.com]

I'd like to be able to buy direct download stuff from retailers ala the iTunes and Steam.

It would be cool if internet was fast and cheap enough that I could buy a movie or game or TV series and then have it linked to my account so that I don't need to keep it physically in my house.

When I installed some old Blizzard games, I got the the point where I was asked to register them. At that point I was redirected to the new Battle.net where I created an account and then registered the product. My account now allows me to download a digital copy of the game, with the "CD key" type stuff now all stored by Blizzard, so should my copies eventually die, I can still enjoy the product. I think this is a pretty awesome thing and would love to see a day when everything I buy that is on some sort of disk has a similar option.

Re: What currently unavailable things would you like to do?

[morsla.livejournal.com]

Then you only have to worry about the company going belly-up or changing access to the archived material :)

Still, I really like the idea of being able to access and re-download software when needed, without needing to queue up a huge download that takes all night to finish.

Re: What currently unavailable things would you like to do?

[harkon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I heard people going crazy when WalMart said they were shutting down the DRM servers for their music store.

I like the Blizzard model though, since I still have my physical copy and the download seems to just ask for a CD key. All I'm tied to is that Blizzard continues to maintain the service.

Re: What currently unavailable things would you like to do?

[morsla.livejournal.com]

It's a pretty major issue actually, especially with the rate at which companies are either closing down or being bought out by others. There are all sorts of tangled issues with things like information privacy, but most users don't really care unless it causes them problems directly... from the work the CRC has been doing, convenience trumps any kind of concern about security, privacy or trust.

[moniemonstar.livejournal.com]

being in the usa and having dramatically faster broadband has changed the way i watch tv. instead of making a point of sitting in front of the tv at a certain time and day, i add a show to my hulu queue and watch it whenever i want to. However, if it weren't for truly unlimited data plans they have here that are quite affordable, there is no way i could do it. just because broadband will be faster doesn't necessarily means it will be more accessible. Its something i'm going to miss when i come home.

[morsla.livejournal.com]

Data plans are the big mystery part of the NBN, so far... they're planning 100Mbps connections, but nobody seems willing to speculate on how much it will cost for a similarly huge data plan.

I think the TV networks are in for a big change when it starts up, though - they'll have to really re-think how they do business if they want to survive.

[vass]

If broadband was dramatically faster, then it'd probably be correspondingly less expensive, and I'd be able to afford to Skype.

[morsla.livejournal.com]

That's part of the plan, as far as political PR goes... the aim is to make good quality broadband available to all homes in the country. Part of that is obviously about infrastructure for the areas that don't have any access at present, but making things more affordable would be a pretty big deal.

[sylver-spiders.livejournal.com]

Buying more digitally distributed computer games would be the main one for me, and I agree with what Lap said about liking linked accounts avoiding the need for a physical copy of a product. I'd probably watch a bit more streaming video, too.

[sols-light.livejournal.com]

I think the biggest underestimation is not of use to the home consumer, which everyone else has detailed into more choice and many of the options we have been deprived of that the US enjoys, but the impact to business.

The ability to centralise documents in an online space and have multiple people simultaneously working in a shared space across the country or globe is a phenomenal resource, not to mention the obvious exapnsion into entire online workspaces.

These become playspaces too if you extend things into a Second Life style world.

There's also the major bottleneck of the moment with limited data transfer and the ability of a few milliseconds in trading which can actually be the difference in some business deals.

I don't want to see a standardised business space online run solely by the likes of M$, but there is enormous power and potential in the ability to finally transfer large amounts of data and work on it. Think about Australia's entertainment industry and the possibility of editing happening in that simultaneous space, the flow on ideas of that to every other form of business are quite tantalising.

Of course, much of this requires software that's only in its infancy, but that in and of itself is something to support.

If you look at South Korea, it's also led to things like the development of purely online entertainment channels for the broadcast of nationwide events like Starcraft championships, which allow advertising revenues to reach markets which will otherwise ignore it or be alpha-geek adopters who help assist with brand awareness.

[aslan42.livejournal.com]

Online games already require more speed than is available in Australia. When pearl was playing Second Life she was reguarly asked why her connection was so slow. It's actually the fastest commercially available in the country, but the Americans thought she was on dial-up...

[morsla.livejournal.com]

What sort of connection do you have at the moment?

I guess we're pretty close to dialup, from a broadband perspective...