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Liberal Vs Labor 2008 Broadband Scheme

In the run up to the Federal Election, the two main parties, the Liberal Party and Labor Party, have proposed contending plans for the roll out of broadband access across Australia. Discuss the relative benefits and pitfalls of each approach from both a technical perspective and a social equity perspective.

Broadband is an important means of communication between the public in today’s society. It facilitates the distribution of sending and receiving information such as television programs or video conferencing. However, in order for the successful delivery of information to occur, a pathway must be established to transmit data. This pathway must allow for the immediate spread of information to ensure its accuracy and validity in our information age. Australia is currently ranked 24th out of the 26 countries that have access to broadband on a global scale (Abood 2007). This is an alarming statistic as some major cities barely meet the standards for decent broadband connections. Ahead of the upcoming election, Australia’s two major political parties; Labour and Liberal, have announced their plans to solve the country’s broadband problem (which may potentially affect Australia’s economic prosperity), if elected. Labour has developed a rough outline of Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) for the majority of the Australian population. A wireless service, WiMax, will be implemented for the minority population (eg: those in rural areas, etc). Alternatively, the Liberals have arranged to expand the availability of ADSL2+; making it available across metropolitan cities, to some major regional centers whilst also using WiMax as a major provider outside major cities.
The Australian Labour Party has proposed a single tier broadband network solution that shall provide Fibre-To-The-Node (FTTH) to 98% of Australians and WiMAX, a wireless solution, to the remaining 2% by 2013 (Conroy 2007). Labour has declared that the new network will exceed a minimum of 12 megabytes per second; which...