Inefficiencies that will plague the NBN

With NBN Co planning a public education campaign and the debate finally moving on from simplistic 'wireline versus wireless', perhaps we can have some more sophisticated discussion about Australia's largest infrastructure project.

This new discussion should include the technologies being used, and the disruptive innovation required to meet the world's insatiable desire for high-speed data at home and on the move. As Andrew Harris has noted on many occasions, the debate needs to be centred on the mix of wireless and fibre technologies in the NBN plan.

Last month Optus chief executive Paul O'Sullivan lamented the fact media coverage of the NBN had moved to the early general news section of most newspapers, and as a result was being oversimplified.

It's a view shared by Bell Labs president Jeong Kim who was in Australia last week to help the University of Melbourne officially launch the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET). Kim is at the forefront of telecommunications technology, leading a lab with a decades-long history of making telecommunications breakthroughs.

Kim was genuinely surprised a debate was even being had about optical fibre being superseded by new technology, or suggestions wireless could one day entirely serve the needs of Australia's connected population.

Instead, Kim was keen to move the discussion forward to the massive leap required to improve telecommunications technology and achieve efficiency gains, and how organisations can find ways to cheat channel limits, such as 4G.

It's this type of thinking and questioning that's required in any useful conversation about the future of the internet.

CEET director and laureate professor Rod Tucker likes to remind people that while the internet currently uses about 1 per cent of the world's electricity, exponential growth in use of the internet could see this rise to 50 per cent by 2030 if we do nothing to improve its efficiency. And that's without considering the energy used to dig trenches and lay cable.

Kim argues the real issue holding networks back will ultimately be energy efficiency and heat dissipation, not cost and performance.

To demonstrate his point he tells the story of a debate he once had on a long plane trip with American physicist (now US energy secretary) Steven Chu, on the ability of the human brain versus a computer.

“What we agreed through this 24 hour discussion was that the hardest constraint is heat distribution,” Kim says.

The human brain, whilst the best neural network in existence, cannot dissipate more than 20 watts of heat.

In an interconnected world networks start to resemble those in the human brain – and as such heat becomes an issue.

“You believe that cost and performance is a constraint, actually the ability to dissipate heat is the main constraint because just like human beings, the network itself is a living thing,” Kim says.

And so CEET's researchers have a real job on their hands to explore new ways of making networks more efficient.

Australians are capable of understanding these concepts, but from time to time a technical discussion is required, and politicians, network providers and the media shouldn't shy from getting into the detail.

NBN Co is required to deliver a public education campaign, but one of its executives recently said it would be focused on the benefits of the technology rather than “all the technical stuff”.

Let's hope NBN Co doesn't add to the dumbing down of the technology surrounding the NBN in a bid to sell it to Australians.