Go to Australia and you’ll quickly realize that not only is the country run reasonably well, but the continent also has a good digital infrastructure.
This is no surprise, because Australia has made a significant investment in national broadband infrastructure as part of an agenda to capture economic and social benefits in the emerging digital economy. Government broadband, particularly for the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN), ensures ubiquitous national availability of an open access, high-speed services delivery platform.
Recently the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET) undertook a study, Benefit of the National Broadband Network, to see exactly how beneficial government broadband is to the country of Australia.
The study established that the NBN will likely deliver a substantial economic benefit, but it highlighted the importance of new service utilization to meet that potential.
The study found that NBN should boost real GDP by about 1.8 percent and real household consumption by about 2 percent. After NBN debt-servicing requirements are taken into account, growth in real household consumption is about 1.4 percent thanks to the government broadband infrastructure of NBN.
The study found that the government broadband initiative also benefited six categories of online services above and beyond the economic growth mentioned above. These categories were:
- Cloud computing
- Electronic commerce
- Online higher education
- Telehealth practice
- Teleworking
- Entertainment
“A clear finding of the study is that there would be negligible economic benefit in building an NBN if the only utilized service category is entertainment,” noted a recent Alcatel-Lucent blog post that looked at the study. “However, economic benefits will flow if other services, such as telehealth and teleworking, are more widely spread and utilized as a result of NBN.”
The findings clearly show that investment in government broadband initiatives do, in fact, benefit the economy as a whole and lead to the foundation that benefits business in the digital age. While the benefits of government broadband initiatives have been widely talked about, it is reassuring to see examples of these benefits in practice. Australia is one such place to look for an example of the benefits of government broadband.
