MarketingWeek.co.nz

Is our government’s commitment to fibre to the home and high speed broadband little more than a ‘cargo cult’? That’s the question that’s being posed by the Motu Institute at University of Waikato and the Institute for the Study of Competition and Regulation at Victoria University.

As reported by Commsday:

Building on a 2009 study by the Motu Institute which found that whilst the move from no broadband to slow broadband yielded productivity gains, the move from slow broadband to high speed fibre based broadband had ”no discernable additional effect” Howell and Grimes have now gone further. In a recent paper “Feeding a Need for Speed or Funding a Fibre ‘Arms Race’?” they ask whether a broadband productivity paradox is now emerging that mirrors the more general paradox found within the ICT sector where massive investment has not yielded the expected productivity gains.

Chris Barton pours his own dose of cold water on the research in the NZ Herald:

Those who tut-tut that we can’t justify a fibre optic rollout in cost/benefit terms, or argue that the productivity gains from slow to fast broadband are negligible, betray a terrible lack of understanding of what this thing called the internet is.

Personally, we don’t care. We just want our fibre thanks, and decent speeds to bring the world closer to us. Let’s not get too hung up about little things like ROI.

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