Magical Thinking
Is this true? This seems to be a fixation of Australians: "If only we had Great Internet, we'd build Great Technology". It's never specified: telemedicine, teleeducation, or a bunch of "if you build it they will come" wibbling. Yes, they are likely to come, but only to the superior porn that they are downloading on their Fat Pipe.
It's revealing that the thing that provoked this article was a neat looking telly and the realization that 4K content is thin on the ground. Because the road to amazing innovation starts with watching an expensive telly.
I do understand that (a) the government is made a hash of this and (b) at the margins there are some work-from-home cases where better connectivity means the difference between being able to do this job or not. But I'm not seeing that there's going to be an productivity explosion as a result of people being able to sit home and edit RAW files.
No-one ever seems to be able to point to a particularly important technology that is being developed in some other country where, if only we had the capability to do Really Fast Downloads, we would be ahead. As far as I can tell countries with great connectivity spend more time playing computer games and downloading movies than we do.
I have a suspicion that better tech might emerge from places with *even shittier internet* than we have.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
