NBN “useless” without subsea investment

Investing in a National Broadband Network was "useless" if some of the up to $43 billion wasn't allocated to upgrading international subsea networks, according to Australia's leading start-ups.

Over 60 submissions from a who's who of the start-up sector, represented by Silicon Beach Australia, have been condensed into a paper and submitted to the Federal Government.

The paper outlined a set of crowd-sourced proposals that, if implemented, would "create a better future for Australia" and local technology entrepreneurs.

Several recommendations dealt with the NBN and internet filtering. Entrepreneurs said they wanted internet access to be a selling point to the world.

But while the NBN was seen as a "positive step", the community believed "the network could waste its potential" if it didn't focus on international - rather than just domestic - pipes.

International links would be critical to attracting foreign and data centre investments supporting cloud-based business models.

"An insular NBN with the same backhaul [or] contention ratios currently experienced in Australia to the global internet would be counter productive," the paper said.

"Without allocating, say, 20 percent of money to the international data pipes, the 80 percent that would be spent on the development of a national broadband network is considered useless.

"Unless we are in a data path to other resources on the global internet map, or can entice the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific to use us for something [like the location for data centres] we will remain a backwater."

The entrepreneur community highlighted subsea links between Australia and either Asia or the U.S. as most critical to prevent bottlenecks.

Pipe International was expected to bring online the latest subsea cable in the region in October, connecting Sydney to Guam.

It also added support to an open access regime and provided a "universal denouncement" of proposals to filter the internet.

"It is believed the only group to benefit from [mandatory internet filters] will be the companies that will provide the software to the government to run this," the paper said.