Broadband’s great, isn’t it? It’s fast. It’s “always-on.” It’s fast. Service providers are falling over themselves to flog it. It’s fast. Everyone’s talking about it. And ...it’s fast.“Broadband will change your life” – so say the glossy magazine ads and slick TV commercials, or words to that effect.

Hmmm. That’s great and all, but how exactly? For a company to establish a business case broadband has got to mean more than just quick emails, web surfing, games, and music/movie downloads. Much more.

Well, it does but only when emphasis is placed on the higher value-added applications, rather than on ‘fast’ access just for the sake of it (or for fun). Beyond being simply a high-speed connection, broadband can enable a wide array of applications that facilitate economic, technological and societal change – but it’s a matter of picking our way through the hype and finding the heroes amongst the hoop-la. Let’s look at just what really can be achieved. Here are seven habits you could get into with interactive high-speed voice, video and data communications.

1. Leverage IP Telephony & Voice Over IP
IP Telephony is about more than cheap toll calls – it’s about convergence and convenience. It’s a service that uses the Internet Protocol (IP) signalling system to enable the traditional functions of the telephone – voice, facsimile and voice-messaging application – across a public or private data network.

What this means is that there’s no longer a need for separate voice and data networks, potentially saving time and money as one network carries all communications.

It can provide additional cost savings, especially to companies across several locations, through bypassing toll charges or reducing the number of telephone lines required. IP Telephony also offers the convenience of enhanced functionality, such as integration into other solutions, and ‘follow me’ call routing, where the user can relocate anywhere on the network and the details (phone number, messaging, etc) stay the same.

2. The teleworking dividend
Aka telecommuting or e-work, this is the ability to work on the company network – seamlessly retaining all of the features and functionality enjoyed at the office – but from a remote location. It’s often associated with working from home (full-time or now and then) but can just as easily apply to satellite offices or ‘on the road’ – in fact, anywhere employees have access to a broadband connection. Although it’s a concept that struggles with ‘trust’ issues, on the face of it teleworking can pay real dividends, including reduced overheads, increased productivity and, potentially, increased employee retention and satisfaction, as they can be more flexible in how they work.

3. Using Application Service Providers (ASPs)
Fast internet, or broadband as it is also known, provides the bandwidth necessary to use ASPs. These are companies that source e-business solutions, and host and manage software on their own servers. This is all made available to customers online 24/7, usually through a web browser. There are a number of benefits to the ASP model, most notably it spares users the need to buy, install, and troubleshoot their own applications. ASPs may also handle security, ongoing development, and the integration of e-business processes with existing systems (see box 1 below for a typical example of ASPs in action).

September 2005

By Greg Adams

4. The ease of teleconferencing
Any organisation that regularly conducts meetings between people in different locations – be they colleagues, clients or suppliers – stands to benefit from teleconferencing.

It allows for more frequent meetings, avoids costly travel and lost opportunity time, and helps to maintain business relationships easily and cost-effectively. While much the same can be said for audio- and video-conferencing, teleconferencing is a significant step up. Participants don’t just hear and see each other. They can share data and interact in a multi-media environment, perhaps making a presentation, collaborating on business plan, or sharing documents and images.

5. Enjoying rich media websites
Rich media is the rising star of the online world – but you’ll need a high-speed Internet to enjoy it. By rich media, I mean the likes of video, audio, animation and flash. It allows for not just a more entertaining online experience but, generally, a more useful one as well. Of course, spinning logos might be fun for a developer to create, but they don’t add real value. When used to add business value, rich media has the power to convey a whole new dimension of information that can otherwise be hard to articulate or envisage – like enjoying virtual tours, 3D modelling, and streaming video, all from the comfort of your desktop.

A great example of rich media in action is Google Earth, which requires broadband for you to spin the world and zoom in to check out property and facilities anywhere in the world.

6. The merits of multiple access
Broadband is the common term for a high band-width Internet connection. Not only can it send or receive information many times faster than dial-up, but this bandwidth allows for multiple uses on one connection. Take Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) users who can still make and take normal telephone calls while on the Internet. With the right set-up, several people can use the same high-speed connection – reducing the cost and complexity of working in an online environment.  

7. Did I mention it was fast?
Yeah, okay, maybe once or twice. But from a business point of view, slow connections waste time and money. Period. They make exchanging large files almost impossible. Likewise email marketing, online banking and a number of applications broadband users take for granted. It’s nearly impossible to run a successful e-commerce site on dial-up, much less accommodate such new technologies as collaborative computing, online backup, remote software updating and support, or virtual private networks. Take New Zealand’s largest sawmill, Red Stag Timber, for example: it is adopting broadband so that a vendor in the US who’s software runs a key piece of plant can log in to do upgrades and fixes – saving the company on traveling expenses and costly delays.

Most ISPs run a simulation of speeds – from the zoopy to the zombie. Check them out. In the meantime, to give you some idea, a typical MP3 track (about 5 Megabytes) takes approximately 15 minutes to download on dial-up, 3.5 minutes on 256 Kbps, 25 seconds on 2 Mbps, and 6 seconds on a 10 Mbps link. So, there you have it. These are just some of the ways in which you could find yourself taking advantage of a broadband-enabled environment.

Clearly, there’s much a high-speed Internet connection can offer. Whether or not they become habits depends on the case you can build for including them in your everyday working life. Some might be appropriate to improving the way you currently do business; some might open up new opportunities or efficiencies. As for the others, well, you won’t know until you try. One thing’s for certain, however, high-speed Internet will already be changing the way your competitors operate – you can’t afford to ignore it.

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• Fast Internet: where do you get it?
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Broadband in the Asia-Pacific

While the West still thinks 1Mbps Internet connections are pretty slick, Internet users in Japan, South Korea, and China are “riding the light” of optical fibre. The Asia-Pacific region is home to two of the leading broadband nations, South Korea and Japan, and two of the world’s future Internet superpowers, China and India.

South Korea and Japan are in the forefront of broad-band access because their governments have fostered a competitive marketplace through economic and regulatory policy. As a result, their consumers have a choice of broadband technologies and service providers, and residential bandwidth has become extremely affordable.

Broadband connections have gone from 1-3Mbps two years ago to 50Mbps-100Mbps today. New broadband services, including VoIP, online games and IP television, are also driving demand.

As Ben Macklin, eMarketer Senior Analyst explains in a recent eMatketer e-newsletter, “Investing in infrastructure, whether it is roads, railways, equipment or telecommunications, is an investment in the future. The evidence for economic and productivity gains stemming from road and railway upgrades has been well documented. More recently, efficiency gains from utilising IT and e-business processes have also been clearly identified. In 2001, the Brookings Institute estimated that widespread adoption of basic broadband in the United States could add $500 billion to the U.S. economy and produce 1.2 million new jobs - yet there continues to be debate in the US and elsewhere as to the value of investing in broadband infrastructure.

“A question that politicians and CEOs often ask in relation to broadband infrastructure is: what will consumers or businesses do with all that bandwidth? When US telco Verizon announced its intention to roll out optical fibre across its national footprint, one of its competitors quickly responded by suggesting that consumers don’t need that much bandwidth. Yet the building of better roads in the US in the early 20th century was one of the major factors in driving the sale of cars, and in turn creating a massive industry. After all, there is no real point in buying a car if there is no road to drive it on.”

The analogy between road infrastructure and broad-band infrastructure is apt, he says, because it refl ects the global economy’s transition from manufacturing to information and knowledge. The manufactured products of the past were distributed via road and rail; today’s information products are distributed via telecommunications networks.

How NZ's Broadband usage compares

New Zealand ranked 22 out of 30 OECD countries for growth in broadband subscriptions in 2004. Broadband penetration in New Zealand at the end of 2004 was 4.7 subscribers per 100 inhabitants. Australia sits one place above New Zealand, with 7.7 subscribers per 100. South Korea tops the table with 24.9 subscribers for every 100 inhabitants.

However, in 2004 New Zealand had only 2.18 net new connections per 100 inhabitants, as opposed to the OECD average of almost three connections per 100 inhabitants. Australia, in contrast, has a net increase of 4.25 per 100.

Communications minister David Cunliffe has called for New Zealand to reach the top half of the OECD rankings by 2007 and the top quarter by 2010. At the current rate of OECD growth, that would be around 20 users per 100 inhabitants by 2007. But to get these, given New Zealand’s historical rate of growth, of 2.18 subscribers per 100 inhabitants, would take more than a decade.

However, Telecom and the government claim New Zealand’s broadband penetration rate is now increasing at around 80% year-on-year.