Senate advise that most homes will find high-speed broadband unnecessary

The super-fast broadband speeds that will soon be delivered by the new National Broadband Network (NBN) may be something that many homes in Australia simply do not want according to recent information given to the Senate Committee.

The latest plans for the NBN will see the building of a new broadband network by the Federal Government, which will be far faster and more costly than was originally planned, with broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps being rolled out to 90 percent of the Australian population at a cost of around $43 billion.

According to two industry experts the senate committee were told that many homes in Australia at the moment do not require broadband speeds that are this fast and there households are unlikely to pay for services like these.

The committee were advised that the deployment of broadband services running at this speed was currently a high risk investment according to Dr Rowan Gilmore, a communications expert.

He said “The demand for 100-megabit services to most homes is not necessary and would be throttled down in most instances anyway. Certainly there would be business and premises that would benefit from 100-megabits per second connectivity. Without having seen market data, my experience would indicate that that is not necessary in the great bulk of circumstances.”

Only a small number of users like small businesses and universities would be able to afford and even need services running at these kinds of speeds said Dr Gilmore who added that the majority of users would find speeds of 10Mbps more than enough to perform intensive tasks like streaming HD media over the internet.

The other expert present, Dr John Ness added that “your brain can only take in so much data,” and that these 100Mbps speeds would be unnecessary and excessive in most households.

Source – www.abc.net.au