Professor Joshua Gans, who is currently a visiting fellow at Harvard and Australia's leading specialist in the field of 'information economics', has reasserted the important insights in his Age op-ed today that the NBN will be limited to just 2mb/s for all overseas websites and Australian websites that are hosted offshore:
"I’m sitting here in the US at the moment on a 100Mbps maximum speed. But if I look at a website in Melbourne, my speed drops to 2Mbps. That is pretty much the maximum you will get from Australia to much of the internet, regardless of the theoretical maximum of your provider. This is because a key bottleneck is our submarine fibre link rather than our backbone network, or even the last mile."
You can read Joshua's new blog post on the subject of the NBN issues here. Joshua's willingness to voice his concerns is a little surprising given that he was actually one of the originators of the idea of an NBN in the first place. Joshua has also added another reservation into the mix--the fact that the NBN is technology-specific. Or, in his words:
“I note, as always, that this is an issue because the Government refuses to consider the NBN as anything but broadband and is not structuring competition policy nor its own public policy to ensure the NBN becomes more.”
