KEY POINTS:
Business think-tank The New Zealand Institute wants to move the broadband debate from what people experience on a day-to-day level to thinking about the long-term benefits of broadband investment.
Chief executive David Skilling said the institute wanted to make sure long-term strategic questions were part of the discussion of the state of broadband in New Zealand, rather than about what Telecom was or was not doing.
"What we are trying to achieve is to shift the broadband debate in New Zealand away from issues around regulating Telecom and local loop unbundling - not that they are unimportant issues or not worth doing," said Skilling. "There's still going to be a big question for New Zealand to answer - do we need fibre, how quickly do we want to go there, who's going to pay for it?"
Skilling said the institute was studying why broadband matters to New Zealand's economic future.
"Phase one is to try and get our heads around what the landscape looks like, what are the different economic benefits and what sort of speeds we think are necessary to capture those," said Skilling. The second stage was to determine what was the best way to achieve that aspiration, he said.
"How quickly do you want to do this, which areas do you want to target first and, pretty importantly, how do we imagine that we are going to pay for this?" Skilling said.
The institute would investigate overseas funding models, said Skilling, citing Australia, where the Government had stepped in to provide funding to private companies expanding broadband networks into remote areas.
"Private companies have certainly been involved where they see a business case but there is also a sense that the public value to the country as a whole will often be in excess of what private companies would regard as a commercially sensible thing to do," he said.
Skilling expects to release a discussion document on the first stage by the end of the month, with a final report available before the end of the year and a report on phase two of the project available in early 2008.
