Greens on fibre

I’m somewhat staggered to see Frog has blogged against the Government’s fibre to the home programme, and hope that his view is not that of the Green Party.

I’m rather dismayed to see a Green blog repeating moronic nonsense such as fibre will only be used for faster porn.

There are many areas of policy I disagree with the Green Party, but generally I have found myself in agreement with much of their Comms/IT policies – they voted against the original S92A on copyright, they promote open source software, they have been against Internet filtering and censorship, and they supported the operational separation of Telecom.I’ve gone out of my way to praise them in the comms/IT areas I agree with them on – which have been many.

But I can’t believe Frog doesn’t see one obvious benefit (putting aside all the others) from fibre connected homes, and that is the massive impact this may have in having people work from home – this means less fuel consumption, less congestion and less greenhouse gas emissions.

There are two things that would enable people to work from home much more, both which fibre will help enable.

The first is being able to access your work files as quickly and easily as if you are in the office. Sure you can do remote access at the moment, but it is often painfully slow, and nothing like actually being in the office.

The second is near instant high quality video conferencing with multiple people. I don’t mean waiting five minutes as you start the program up, and everyone else does the same. I mean you go to your TV set, push three buttons, and hey two seconds later you have a four way video conference.

Once we have fast enough Internet to do the above, I predict that the number of staff who work at least half the week from home will grow exponentially. Obviously not in some areas such as retail, but some companies may end up with just a meeting room and server as their office, and all their staff working from home. In fact I know of a couple of firms already doing this.