Everyone will by now have seen National’s plans unveiled yesterday for a $1.5b investment in FTTH. John Key’s announcement is below;

Lots of commentary about this already, Rod is pretty positive as it reasonably neatly dovetails with the work the NZI has done (and which Rod was involved in).

Now ubiquitous broadband is a good thing, I’d personally love it. But being a good thing, and being the cure for our economic ills are two very different things. John Key claims FTTH is the productivity unleasher that will move us up the OECD economic rankings – he gives the examples of almost free local toll calls, cheap international calls, movies on-demand and telecommuting. Only one of those things is closely linked to productivity and there is no empirical evidence that a move to a telecommuting enabled world would in fact boost productivity.

I’m not pouring cold water on the idea – I applaud National’s vision and courage – I only hope that the analysis into true return is done such that decision can be made that actually help New Zealand win.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

1 Comment
  • my thoughts exactly. I was at the lunch, and was a bit concerned how Key espoused broadband as a sea-change. Its great, fast broadband is cool. But we need people to be encouraged to utilise and innovate on the basis of fast broadband. The broadband itself is simply a hammer, we need people with the courage and support to learn to use the hammer in brilliant new ways.

    Thats what I really want to hear a position on.

Leave a Reply to Greg DayCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.