Digital Future Summit round-up

I blogged on Thursday on my impressions with the Digital Future Summit. As I said, generally it was a very good event.

I did forget to mention though the annoyance at not having wireless Internet available in the room. Any conference of this type should build it into the price (which was considerable). Even worse there were four signals labelled as for the Digitial Summit, but after repeated attempts to connect to them, discovered they were all reserved for the “official” laptops on each table. Grrr.

Rod Oram was the Chair, and did an excellent job. He writes in the SST:

The nation’s telecommunications sector is clearly entering a new, constructive phase. We’re starting to see the sort of ambitious but collaborative behaviour between players that might finally deliver the very high-speed broadband and great international connections we need to fulfil our economic potential.

This comes not a moment too soon after almost two decades of dysfunctional and destructive behaviour that have left us languishing low in the OECD’s broadband rankings.

Glynn Foster took some detailed notes during the summit, for those wanting more detail.

The Dom Post has a story on how unusual it was for a Telecom CEO to get such warm applause.  Paul Reynolds has done very well to date with his style and direction.  His call for the three big telcos to share more infrastructure is a good call.

Ernie Newman at TUANZ also blogs on the contrasting style of the Ministers there. I rated Cunliffe as excellent and Mallard as very good. Tizard covered her area of digital content well also.