Moxie thoughts — UFB
Tonight was another fantastic Moxie session, thanks to Hayden Glass for organising these. Tonight we were talking about the UFB rollout in New Zealand and what this means to us all, what opportunities it creates, and the value it brings. Well that’s what I thought we were talking about. I tend to absorb the discussion at the Moxie Sessions, then post-process it a lot. Mulling over the conversations of the evening. I am a little bit slow. But here are some thoughts to share with the group and anyone else who is interested.
Here is what I think about UFB and the opportunities it creates for NZ, other than giving us faster Netflix, albeit illegally.
UFB is infrastructure. It will take us years to roll it out to the majority of NZ’ers. When we do it will be a great asset for us to use and abuse on porn. Unless we find something else to do with bigger pipes to the home and business in NZ. Consuming video, be it Apple TV, Netflix or Hulu (or Sky TV should they join this Internet phenomenon thing), is the obvious app for UFB. It is the chunkiest content or data we consume today. But consuming more of this via UFB just means we need to import more data from content producers offshore. This doesn’t help NZ thrive, at worst it means we spend more time at home in front of screens lining US content producers pockets. UFB will give us amazing infrastructure, and we will be the envy of the rest of the world. This is the suggestion, not my assertion. So how do we make the most of fiber, UFB and this advantage we will have over the rest of the world?
We need to get in the business of content generation. New Zealand needs to export digital content to the world, or technology that helps generate and the consumption of digital content. This is a great opportunity for NZ, to do really cool shit with data. Or we could wait until we can legally get Netflix and Hulu here and just consume.
10 years ago YouTube didn’t exist. Neither did Twitter, and a lot of other tech we take for granted today. YouTube was a couple of dudes. So was Twitter. They had some infrastructure and an idea and they built some stuff. They happened to be in the US. What if the next killer data app was invented in NZ. I use the “Invent” word as this is something we Kiwis think we are good at. Inventing. What if we invented a teleporter? That sounds like it will need a lot of data, to send a whole person across space. Might need fiber for that. What about the next raft of Xeros, Vends and other software apps. Sure you don’t need fiber for these, but to encourage every SMB to move their office infrastructure to the cloud. Fiber helps with keeping this fast.
In short, I think we need to get in the business of content generation and export it to the world. Content isn’t Shortland Street episodes either, but it could be. It is apps, video, entertainment, and devices (yes hardware) that leverage off of really fast connections. Holographic video conferencing. A better Skype. Live reality TV streamed from your Google Glass glasses. Whatever. We need to get in the business of exporting more bits to the world. UFB has to help give us a competitive advantage here. Let’s get a bunch of big thinking ideas people together, give them access to capital and let them invent the future tech that will be in every home in 5 years time. That’s what UFB enables us to do. Not watch Netflix. Although that is a pretty good use too, and I would like that. It is just a pretty lame outcome of the UFB project if that is all we do.
Just some random thoughts.