FOR more than a decade now, with a minor interruption, I've been working for Rural Press from an area of northern NSW that standard road maps portray as mostly blank.
That's been possible thanks to the Internet: first dial-up (and the odd 10-day wait when the line got fritzed by lightning); then two successive satellite services (a vast improvement except in days of heavy cloud); and for the last year or so, Telstra's Next G service: brilliant, with caveats.
It's just shy of a 200-kilometre round trip to Armidale, where we do our shopping and banking and socialising.
That trip, now an hour each way, once took two full days on a horse and buggy.
Even for most of the time the automobile has been around, it wasn't a trip to be taken lightly.
Now, thanks to the Internet, my wife and I live and work here, with one foot on farmland and the other in wilderness, holding daily conversations with people around the planet and keeping plugged into the currents of everyday life here and abroad.
Pre-internet, our jobs would have demanded that we live in a city.
No surprise, therefore, that I'm cheering for the NBN, which cleared its major parliamentary hurdle on Monday.
I don't know what form of NBN broadband technology will eventually reach locations like this, 10km from the telephone exchange and one of only four occupied homes along a dead-end stretch of gravel road, but any choice is good choice.
For the past year we've been hooked up to Next G, a service that is excellent and imperfect.
Like a small-diameter firehose, wireless broadband is capable of punching through data at good speeds, but not in great volume.
Because capacity is limited, Telstra constrains its wireless plans to a maximum of 12 gigabytes a month.
To my astonishment, we max out that capacity most months, and typically spend a few days throttled back to the misery of 64 kilobytes per second before the plan resets.
I deal solely in emailed images and documents—the fax is disconnected these days—and am constantly researching on the Web.
My wife's job revolves around big sound files that she pulls down from Internet servers.
We don't have a TV, but my teenage daughter, when she's home from school, is an active member of the Facebook generation.
Twelve gigs barely cuts it now: next year, when expectations of what the Internet should do will have lifted again, it probably won't cut it.
And then there's reliability.
We're at the bleeding edge of service range, but that doesn't explain why Next G functions perfectly for days, and then conks, usually on a Tuesday when I'm on deadline.
As I write, it is a Tuesday. Next G is allowing through half an email, or half a web page, and then collapsing. In a few hours, or tomorrow, after minor chaos has set in, Next G will return from its AWOL without explanation. That's how it goes.
(Later: That's how it went. Telstra promises a fix.)
Vexations aside, without Next G this family would probably be swelling the population of a city.
The NBN vision, of all Australia with access to a cost-effective high-speed broadband connection, pushes the envelope in a couple of ways. The NBN will reach where Next G doesn't (or where Next G reaches, but barely), and it will make more people think about the nature of work and workplaces.
As our cities grow too big to be functional, more people are looking to live elsewhere. In a connected country, someone with a good idea can run a global business from wherever they live. A functional NBN means that people can have the peace of rural living, without the isolation—an attractive combination, as visiting refugees from Sydney recently told us.
The economics might be tricky, the technology yet to be determined, but the vision behind the NBN holds the prospect of transformation in the bush: new kids in faltering bush schools, new internet-generated revenues holding open shop doors in small towns, and new ideas and energy in rural communities that have run out of both.
The NBN might be pitched as being for all Australians, but for most of Australia it merely offers the same, perhaps done better. For the bush, the idea of the NBN—and hopefully the idea is not distinct from the reality—can change everything.
The above article contains a revised ending, submitted on April 4, 2011.
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