Outspoken telecommunications stalwart David Havyatt has called for the industry to shower the federal broadband department with unsolicited submissions on the National Broadband Network.
Outspoken telecommunications stalwart David Havyatt has called for the industry
to shower the federal broadband department with unsolicited submissions on the National
Broadband Network (NBN).
David Havyatt (Credit: ZDNet.com.au)
"How do you get a process of getting input into what's going to
happen on the NBN process? My short answer is: if you've got
anything you think is important on the NBN, write a submission to
the government's regulatory paper, even though it's not one of the
questions they asked," Havyatt said at a Future Forum held by the
Australian Telecommunications User Group today.
Havyatt has previously held a temporary assistant secretary
position within the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) for a few months in 2008, working
with the Regional Telecommunications Independent Review Committee.
Currently, however, he is the manager for regulatory and corporate
affairs at wireless provider Unwired and the owner of Havyatt
Associates, in which capacity he spoke today. Prior to that he held a similar public affairs role at AAPT.
"If we leave
ourselves only to thinking about answering the questions they
asked, it will be leaving areas of the debate out," he said.
The executive stressed that if anyone had absolutely any thought on the network which the
department had so far passed over, they should send it to the government.
"The people in the department need our collective assistance in
helping define the things they need to think about," he said.
Later on, he attempted to illustrate the necessity of this assistance by talking about an incident
where the government had acted in, to his thinking, a short-sighted manner —
the absence of discussion on the digital economy as a part of Kevin Rudd's 2020 summit.
The people in the department need our collective assistance in helping define the things they need to think about
David Havyatt
Havyatt said that a co-chair of the forum when challenged on this point
had said that broadband was being discussed, which should be
enough. Yet Havyatt today pointed out that broadband and the
digital economy were not the same thing. Broadband was a
requirement of the digital economy, but would never replace it.
Although Communications Minister Stephen Conroy acknowledged the
digital economy issue when he met with industry leaders at the
Digital Economy Forum in September last year to ask for ideas on a
future directions roadmap for Australia, his department hadn't
shared his enthusiasm, according to Havyatt.
"Some DBCDE staff ... actually have been known to say, 'I don't
understand why the government needs to talk about the digital
economy', it's already arrived," Havyatt said today. "I thought
that's like saying the transportation revolution had arrived the
moment Benz invented the first motorcar."
Havyatt called for industry not to let their thoughts be put
into a box, but to tackle important issues from different
directions. He believed that people, including policy-makers, were
too prone to look around the world and only see things that
confirmed their world view. The question the industry now needed
to be asking themselves when considering new ideas was "why not?",
he said.
