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Photography as an example of why we need the #NBN

I just brought myself a new 1.5tb drive for backing up my photos today for $98. That goes with the 2Tb I have in my computer the 320gb USB drive and the 880gb USB powered HD’s that I have. 10 years ago a 1tb drive would have cost me around $15k.

I remember fondly my first Zip Drive. (I have about 1gb of zip disks floating around here in the office at home somewhere as well ) That 100meg of storage was a god send for backing up working files and those huge 2meg photo scans that I had.

Back in 1999, Nikon introduced the D1. Their first Digital SLR. It had an amazing 2.7megapixel sensor and cost around 12K AUD. 10 Years later their top prosumer camera has 16megapixels and a price under 1.5K.

Of course now I shoot 10meg Raw shots, and when I can afford the new D7000 they will be near 20meg per shot for raw. And I’m only shooting DX format shots.

Even the new Nokia N8 has a 12megapixel camera. That means a phone will be producing shots that chew up as much space as from my DSLR.

A top of line the Hasselblad H4D chews up 50MB raw files for each shot for a 40Mpixel camera. All in a camera that costs 30k USD. That size will in the next 10 years be what a lot of people have access to as their image sensors..

My Nikon D90 can shoot 720p, but I have a 1080p video recorder as well. Even my phone shoots at 720p.The D7000 is a 1080p camera. The replacement for 1080p is 4k. Having seen Blade Runner with a 4k projection all I can say is wow. So we don’t have home 4k systems yet, and very few cinemas have them. Yet already Youtube will support 4k Video. So there is a business case for using 4k video for say live streaming of a concert over IP and selling tickets. Or even like with the recent World Cup, selling tickets for the Cinema.

As more people can access the technology to create cheap high definition content that they wish to share they run into the limitations of ADSL. Try and upload a video and you will see how long that takes compared to downloading. The NBN whilst not truly symmetrical will offer speeds up to 1gpbs/400mbps compared to say ADSL 2 at 24000/2500 kbps (which is the theoretical best if you live next to the exchange ).

IMHO this ability to upload the content that we are creating is the killer app for the NBN for the general public. The rise of social media, the rise of YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and their increasing ability to serve the content that we produce are what we the public will use the NBN for.

All the doubters say the NBN is going to be too fast… tell me what you did 10 years ago on the net and tell me what you do now… then think about just what the Digital Camera has done in 10 years.

The amount of data we are creating and storing is going up by these volumes, the prices for storing and accessing the data is falling at the same rate, why do people suddenly think that the demand for transferring these files via the internet will suddenly stop?