APPLICATIONS

Fast broadband should herald a revolution in health, education and environmental care for the whole of Australia.

But the national focus needs to shift from building the network to delivering the huge public good benefits it should deliver, says Terry Cutler, Principal of Cutler & Company, and chair of the 2008 Review of the National Innovation System.

Dr Cutler and some of Australia’s leading thinkers will take part in a national roundtable “Australia’s Broadband Future”, hosted by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) in Brisbane at 4.30pm on July 5, 2010. Cutler also chairs the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) Advisory Board

The roundtable is the highlight of CCI 2.0, the nation’s leading forum on creativity and innovation, and will debate “How will Australian society be changed by fast broadband?”

“We’ve been talking about broadband for years. There’s no doubt it is the future,” Dr Cutler says. “It’s a bare fact of life if we want to be a part of the modern world.

“But the current focus is mostly on rolling it out – there has not been nearly enough emphasis on what we are actually going to do with it. There is no national strategy.”

Dr Cutler says the entire cost of the National Broadband Network could be justified by applying it to just one of three major public interest applications – e-health, online education and learning and improving our environmental management.

“A nationwide e-health platform would be a huge benefit and give us one of the most advanced healthcare systems in the world. But we need to start serious planning how to deliver it.

“A second opportunity lies in rethinking how we deliver knowledge to Australians, not just in school but throughout the whole of our lives. Again, fast broadband can play a mighty role in reshaping education and learning.

A third potential use for the network lies in the fast-radiating network of sensors which are reporting all our impacts on the environment. “As these link up via broadband we can manage far better how humans interface with the environment, and control our adverse impacts on it.”

“Any of these applications would be of enormous public benefit, enormous public interest. The CCI Roundtable is incredibly timely as an opportunity to refocus on what Australia really wants to get from its fast broadband services,”Dr Cutler says.

“We also need to be keenly aware that we can stuff it up, if we only focus on the supply side – just building the network. We need far more emphasis on the demand side – on what we can do with broadband that will generate the value to the nation.” Without this focus we could end up with something that looks like an iPhone without the apps, to push an analogy, he said.

Participants in the CCI roundtable include:
• Senator Kate Lundy, ACT Labor Senator & Australian Ambassador for Gov 2.0
• Nicholas Gruen, Chair of the Gov 2.0 taskforce and CEO of Lateral Economics
• Yiying Lu, Designer of the Twitter Over Capacity Fail Whale logo
• Terry Cutler, Principal, Cutler & Company
• Peter Coroneos, CEO, Internet Industry Association
• Chair of the roundtable is Emma Tom, national journalist and opinion columnist

Where: Level 4, Z2 Block, The Glasshouse, Kelvin Grove Campus, Queensland University of Technology.
When: Monday July 5 and Tuesday July 6, 2010.

More details: http://www.cci.edu.au/events/cci-20-symposium