Rewiring the nation with fibre will not be cheap. But as Windsor noted, it will only have to be done once. When the fibre is in place, it will provide a durable and future-proof information pipe to every home that will not only provide today's data rates in the range up to 100 megabits per second, but be easily upgraded to 10, 100, or even 1000 times that speed. Who can say how much data we will be using 20 or 50 years from now? Whatever the answer, the network will be able to deliver it because the user modem in the home can be easily replaced and optical fibre has a lifetime in excess of 60 years. Wireless broadband is ideally suited to mobile applications. It is also well suited to sparsely populated areas where the cost of installing fibre could be prohibitive. But the wireless spectrum is already approaching its capacity in urban areas, and in order to achieve the required bandwidth, a proliferation of wireless towers would be needed. A city such as Melbourne would have required up to 100,000 new wireless towers. Incidentally, every one of these towers would need to be connected via fibre and the towers would consume 200 megawatts more electricity than a fibre-to-the-home network. Wireless will always have a role when the user is mobile. In this sense, home fibre networks and wireless networks are complementary, not competitive. Fibre provides the full capacity and power of the internet, providing bandwidths well beyond wireless. On the other hand, wireless provides mobility with access to limited data. Neither technology will make the other obsolete.

Some opponents of the broadband network have claimed a ''cost-benefit analysis'' will show it is not financially viable. Like other great nation-building investments, traditional financial cost-benefit analyses miss the point because they do not include the social benefits. If a cost-benefit analysis had been applied to the construction of our rural road network, it would never have been built. Many rural industries that prosper today (and that will benefit from the broadband network) would not exist. As another example, the network will allow some hospital patients to go home earlier by providing monitoring in the home. This will provide significant savings to the health system and enable patients to return to their families sooner. Now that we again have some certainty, the debate needs to shift away from politics and the relative merits of different technology options and move to how we can maximise the benefits of broadband to the nation. There are enormous opportunities in areas such as tele-health, aged care, remote distance learning, social networking for isolated communities, online supply chain management, environmental monitoring and smart metering, and water resource management. The list goes on. Overseas studies have shown that large economic and environmental benefits can flow from tele-working for office workers, and substantial greenhouse gas reductions can be achieved by replacing business travel with high-quality video conferencing. The opportunities afforded by ubiquitous high-speed broadband are limited only by one's imagination. The national broadband network will place Australia at the forefront of developments in these areas. It will not only provide the bandwidth needed for a rich variety of applications, it will provide opportunities for entrepreneurs to develop new technologies and services and bring these to market.

Earlier this year, tele-health technology saved the life of a Wangaratta man who was taken to hospital, unable to move on one side of his body. The hospital was able to use technology to connect to a neurologist at the University of Melbourne, who identified the symptoms of stroke and through quick intervention saved the patient's life. The broadband network will enable this kind of rapid medical intervention just about anywhere in the country. Tele-health is one of many projects at my institute. Other areas of research include education and learning, social networking, and e-business. If we do things right, the broadband network will stimulate a new generation of innovators. Loading Who knows, the next Google might come out of an Australian university or the next YouTube or Facebook out of a backyard garage in Melbourne or Armidale. Rod Tucker is director of the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society at the University of Melbourne, which is funded by the Victorian government and the university.