Australia must maintain speed in ICT
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Australia risks being left far behind its international competitors in business, education and the arts, as a global revolution in technology brings internet speeds hundreds of times faster than those available here and promises to change the world dramatically.
The warning was delivered in Melbourne by US technology guru Larry Smarr, who said Australia needed to invest more in its universities to ensure it had the people and the knowledge to stay ahead in a highly competitive game. Professor Smarr, director of California University's Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, is a physicist and a specialist in supercomputing and internet infrastructure. He gave the keynote address at the Australian American Leadership Dialogue at the weekend, saying that in his time in Australia there was one dominant complaint he'd heard from everybody, and that was the slowness of "so-called broadband." He said Australians also had to deal with the "self-imposed disadvantage" of artificial caps put on the amount of data that could be attained. "This is not something that many other countries have," he said. "You've got to have a level playing field for the citizens of Australia. "The world can move at a speed that is breathtaking. If you are not committed to maintaining that speed yourself and you begin to fall behind, it can become essentially impossible to catch up." Professor Smarr came to Australia in 1988 with the message that the internet was not a passing fad and that Australia needed to be part of it. He told those attending the dialogue that since then internet speeds had got tens of thousands of times faster. Professor Smarr noted the intense debate over the next stage of broadband development in Australia, as conference organisers joked that a plan was in place to restrain Telstra executive Phil Burgess if he tried to grab the microphone. "I look at the kind of turmoil in the financial markets we have this week, issues of climate change, the avian flu virus, international security," Professor Smarr said. "These things have all become global. There's nothing that can be solved any more in a single country. This is the new world we're about to enter." Australia needed to invest in this new technology to ensure it maintained its high standard of living, he said. "What we've learned in California is that the universities are absolutely the most critical element of the innovation economy," he said. "We've heard there's going to be a labour shortage for trained people in Australia. Where do they come from?" He said Australia relied heavily on its universities to provide those graduates. "The level of innovation that goes on in universities is quite striking and in order to take those innovations into the marketplace and create new companies and new values is what has driven Silicon Valley (the wireless valley near San Diego), and the biotech revolution. "In Australia the universities are not at that level... that's one of your most important challenges." Source: AsiaMedia |
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