Regional Telecommunications Review submission
Prepared by Daemon Singer, Director, Footprint IT and Footprints in the Outback Pty Ltd.
Thank you for the opportunity to make a submission to this review into Australia's regional telecommunications access and the issues raised in the bush about the differentials which exist between city-dwellers and those who make a "lifestyle choice" to live west of the Great Divide and by virtue of living in that area, contribute to our ability to feed ourselves as a nation.
In making this submission I wear 3 hats.
- I am the treasurer of Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA).
- I have a small IT company currently operating in Brisbane which will eventually move to the country in the Maranoa district of Western Queensland.
- My wife and I have recently purchased property in that same area, via our self-managed super fund.
Over the weekend of July 3,4 and 5, my wife, Heather, and I attended meetings in the village of Mungallala, with several local mothers, people involved in "cultural support", farmers and local business people. We also met with the principal of the school.
This submission is essentially the gathering together of the information gained during those meetings from people who had never heard that the review was being conducted, and would otherwise have now had no input into it even though they are representative, clearly, of the people most affected by the current situation with the "service" to Australia's outback in terms of telecommunications and the capacity to move forward in a digital age.
Q1. Do people in regional Australia believe their reliance on telecommunications differs from those in urban areas? How does it differ and can you provide examples?
It's quite evident from the discussions we had, that the use made of telecommunications in the bush compared to the city is enormously different,but only up to a point. If one considers the situation of the mothers for example, they have children aged between 5 and 14 who go the local school, and during school hours as a result of the work of the school principal, have access to the Internet by the schools satellite service.
Once they get home however things change radically, inasmuch as they have extremely limited access to the Telstra provided "broadband" which is delivered as a wireless service being charged at around $110 month for 15 GB of data. Problematically, as a result of the curriculum which spans the state and in some respects the nation, those children have exactly the same requirements in terms of home work, research, assignments etc. which have to be submitted, and the data requirements are going to be exactly the same as those for children being educated in the city. The difference in Mungallala of course, is that the school has 8 children, not 1,100, so the economies of scale don’t apply.
I think the thing that stands out most in this situation is that among the 18 children supported within this community of 120 people, are the different types of education delivery, and the challenges inherent in each one which then gives rise to questions being asked about why children in the country are considered to be so much less deserving of services than children in the city. Learning is delivered in 2 major forms, in person and online and both of those are then further broken down as follows:
- in-person delivery
- delivery at the local school
- delivery at a distant school (around 45 km away)
- delivery at boarding school (anywhere from 120 km to 650 km distant)
- online delivery
- delivery by School of the air
- delivery by home-schooling
Everyone we spoke to during the weekend, failed to see any difference between their requirements for decent digital servicesand the city, especially when considering that most of the mothers see the Internet first as being provided to enable their kids to be educated whilst in the case of 2 of them, their own use revolves around utilising Facebook to stay in touch with distant relatives.
In terms of the uses made of the Internet, one of the things that stood out during my discussions surrounded the issue of home-schooling, which whilst not prevalent certainly does occur, simply as a result of the distances involved in getting to school. One young chap and his sister, 12 and 14 years old, are home-schooled because the distance to their "local" school is slightly over 120 km. Since a lot of what they do as part of their education involves online conferences with fellow students and teachers, their satellite Internet at 128 kB per second is far too haphazard to be relied on for these “webinars”, so frequently they find themselves missing out on what little bit of social interaction they have with other youngsters, as well as the lesson content delivered via the “webinar”.
Q2. For those users already connected to an NBN network service, has the service met your expectations?
This question currently remains outside the requirements of this submission. No NBN has been put in place.
Q3. Having regard to the technical solution like to be used in your area, do you have views on the adequacy of that solution in terms of meeting needs now and into the future?
At this juncture, this question remains outside the requirements of this submission, as there is no indication at this stage whether NBN will be provided by satellite or fixed local wireless.
Q4. Irrespective of the adequacy of your local access, are there issues with backhaul or long-distance carriage that impact your use of telecommunication services?
Currently, there are no backhaul issues at all since the access to Internet in this area is completely inadequate premised on the needs of the local population.
Mungallala, whilst very small, still should be seen as representative of the needs of the wider rural population of this country. The farmers who are responsible for provision of our food and clothing via their work with cattle, sheep and grain production, still have children who need to be educated, still have health needs that need to be addressed and still have interactions with government which need to be supported technologically as we move more and more towards an "E-government" model of community management, and provision of services.
Currently, Mungallala has a local library with about 300 books and that's the limit of the provision of "cultural" services to this community by the local council. In a worst-case scenario, with 300 books in the library, and in the immediate vicinity 32 possible borrowers, it is fairly obvious that the process of approaching the local council for a copy of a particular book, then waiting several weeks for it to arriveis completely inadequate to the needs of anybody undertaking education whether they be children or adults, if the book that they require is something which is part of their research.
Since the access to Internet is so inadequate, reading books online doesn't even become an option for either school students or adults, because the maximum they can get on a per month basis from Telstra, the local provider of wireless services is 15 GB per month per account. The only way around this, is to have multiple accounts and as one reaches its 15 gigs of usage, the next one has to be provisioned and put in place. From my technological point of view, it's an enormous positive that the mothers of those children who require Internet for school have been able to develop this workaround, and put it in place themselves, without referral to a high-level technology support provider.
Q5. For users living in areas without mobile coverage, what priorities, other than specific locations do you consider should be recognised in future efforts to improve coverage?
Currently, Mungallala itself (the village), has mobile coverage of a sort, but it is spotty to say the very least, and there are areas where the mobile coverage simply does not reach. For example, I can stand on the veranda of the hotel and not get a signal on my mobile phone from Telstra, but I can walk into the middle of the street, dodging 4 dog road trains, and get a 60% signal. Owing to the number of road trains going through Mungallala at 60 km/h, it has been recommended to me that I do not do this too often.
At the sawmill, about 150 m outside the edge of town, there is coverage of about 40% signal, upon which the management depend to provide service to their client base as far south as Melbourne, but again they are limited to 15 GB per month.
The fact of the matter is thatplaces like Mungallala, and there are quite a few of them, are treated not as second-class citizens so much as just not important enough to be even thought about in the planning process for mobile/Internet/telecommunications coverage.
At some point, the people who do the planning for coverage need to understand that everybody in Australia has the same rights to develop as people, as communities and as members of wider society as everyone else. Those who make a "lifestyle choice" (to quote some politician or other), to live west of the great divide should not be made to suffer because of their “decision”!
Amongst the discussions I've had whilst doing the research for this submission, was the observation by onecorrespondentthat the only way to get Telstra to do anything for them, was to talk to their local member. Apparently, the only people Telstra listen to when it comes to taking responsibility for their appalling service are politicians, and whilst this surprises me at one level, when I consider how recently Telstra was part of the bureaucracy under another name, it makes me wonder just what impact/benefit thecorporatisation of a government department has.
Originally, when PMG was responsible for providing telephone services, they were required to give everybody access to a line. My own experience as recently as 1985 was to be on a party line in NSW, which was supplied across multiple paddocks on a piece of number 8 fence wire supported on sticks and through trees, and required 2 large dry cell batteries and a piece of copper stuck in the ground, to work. Technologically, we have come past that, but it appears that the provision of services by the likes of Telstra have not.
Essentially, if the service providers are allowed to completely ignore the bush on the basis of no profit, while supplying my Brisbane office at a “reasonable” speed with twice as much data as I can ever imagine myself using, it will continue to appear as though the bush with 15 GB per month delivered over mobile broadband for $100, is subsidising the city with 1 TB at 130 megs per second for exactly the same amount of money. I fail to see how that can be justified.
Q6. What opportunities do the mobile network industry see for extending coverage in regional Australia and increasing investment in mobile networks?
Premised on my answer to Q5, it is my firm belief that the mobile broadband/Internet service industry see no benefit whatsoever in provision of services to the bush. This view appears to be exacerbated by the lack of interest from the government in forcing the issue of providing equitable access to communications technology right across Australia. I believe there needs to be more research into this issue and perhaps the communications providers need to be encouraged a little more forcefully to provide acceptable levels of service to all areas, not just the population hubs.
Again, as part of my research into this submission I approached a number of satellite providers around Australia asking about getting either mobile satellite or fixed satellite service installed in Mungallala. I was unable to even get one to quote, and the reason they gave was "Telstra have that area covered with mobile broadband". Whilst that may be true on paper, it is most certainly not true on the ground in as much as the so-called "coverage" from Telstra as noted earlier, is at best spotty.
I think the one thing that particularly needs to be addressed at a government level with the local “provider”, Telstra, is why do they limit subscriber’s access to Internet to 15 GB per month? Why do they see people in the country is having needs so much lower than people in the city? The fact that not everybody in the city, or in country towns, have children to educate doesn’t change the fact that there are some people who thrive on the ability to keep informed. Why does Telstra feel 15 GB per month is “sufficient”? Just as importantly, why are satellite providers prevented from accessing this area?
Q7. Do you have any views on co-investment approaches that might help improve the broadband technology outcome in your area?
I believe it would make sense for several of the major Internet providers to co-invest in at least part of the infrastructure required to provide services to areas such as Mungallala.
For example, sharing the cost of building a single tower to enable all providers to have a single place to put their repeaters/aerials would reduce the cost to them of provision of service.
Whilst Mungallala is never likely to pay for itself in terms of the cost of provision of service, that cost should be able to be balanced off against the profits earned in the high return areas of the cities, where data is virtually “given” away by the majorplayers.
My own experience in Brisbane is a good example of that where my needs are actually 500 gigs per month, but for no extra money my data volume was doubled. Useful as that may be to some people, if I as a provider of high-end IT services cannot use 1 TB a month, considering that every machine I build absorbs 1.7 to 2 GB of data, and I really can't manage to use 500 GB per month, one wonders where all the complaints about networkcontention come from.
In terms of actual structure, the alternative would be reasonably priced roaming agreements between the telecommunications providers so anyone with a broadband connection, irrespective the provider, would have access to data when travelling in the bush. This would enable more efficient use of the in-place infrastructure, and whilst it wouldn't actually provide competition, it would make a decision to spend 3 days in the bush with the family somewhat easier, because people would not be out of touch via their mobile phones, and would be able to carry on answering emails etc.
Q8. How might new applications and services that utilise mobile networks for voice and data transform the way you live and work?
I'm currently working on development of an application to enable country-based trucking networks to compete with the likes of "StarTrack" transport which utilises satellite tracking on their vehicles to enable accurate forecasts of times of delivery, and to see when trucks/drivers are not being fully utilised.
My system utilises mobile telecommunications, rather than satellite at very low price, enabling transport clients to be kept informed of delivery times etc.. The fact that mobile coverage in thebush is so hit and miss currently, means that whilst my system works quite nicely, it is nowhere near as accurate as the systems which utilise satellite all the time. This inability to access reasonably priced geo-data means that any country-based transport company is left out in the cold in terms of provision of service to clients who are either sending or receiving goods via the massive outback transport infrastructure.
In terms of the local impact of something like this in Mungallala, somebody who was waiting for medicine to be sent from either Roma or Charleville would be able to look on the Internet to see when their medication is arriving. Whilst not necessarily an issue at the moment, since locals actually drive to Roma or Charleville to get their medication in an emergency, the ability to track where a parcel is in real time would make life enormously simpler.
Secondarily, the current process for shopping in Mungallala is that if somebody is going to town they let others know and either shop on their behalf, or take them along for the ride. Discussions are currently underway to introduce some form of community transport, but that will not happen for quite some time, so reasonable access to Internet would enable locals to shop online at the larger supermarkets and have their shopping delivered on a particular day of the week for the whole town. Lack of Internet access prevents this.
Q9. What communications barriers have you experienced in expanding or operating your business or providing services, such as health or education? Have you been able to overcome these barriers and if so, how?
My current plan is to move to Mungallala in about 6 years when I am 66 years old. At that time I hope to be able to provide, via the property my wife and I have recently purchased, to run a small IT company servicing the needs of the outback within a 500 km range north, west and south of Mungallala. Without an affordable, reliable Internet service that will be extremely difficult.
Premised on the situation currently extant, where it appears that Telstra prevents satellite companies providing services anywhere they have "mobile broadband coverage”, it seems relatively obvious that my plan for service provision will not be viable.
Whilst it appears that NBN will come eventually to Mungallala, it's not until such time as we have some form of stable, reliable, price competitive form of digital communications, organizations such as mine, small as it is, will be unable to access equitable cost-effective up-to-date technology in the bush.