Draft Oberon Digital Plan 2026

Oberon Council Digital Plan comments

General

Spelling in the document should reflect Australian practice. For example, "centre" is incorrectly spelt as "center" throughout the document.

The entire document appears to be completely nbn-centric. There is no mention of alternative digital connectivity services which are now widely used in Oberon LGA, specifically the StarLink low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite system, and the forthcoming LEO system being set up by Amazon (with others also under development). All evidence is that there has been a large-scale migration from the very slow geosynchronous satellite service currently offered by nbn SkyMuster to the StarLink service, and thus not to even mention StarLink is a major oversight in such a plan. It is noted that non and Telstra personnel assisted in the writing of the document, but that is not an excuse for the plan being entirely nbn- and Telstra-centric to the exclusion of all other competitors and alternatives.

Section 3.

Characterising Oberon as three hours drive from both Sydney and Canberra would be more accurate. It is two hours drive only from the outskirts of Western Sydney. Arguably more than 3 hours given the recent and ongoing closure of the Great Western Highway at Victoria Pass.

The maps in section 5.1.1 contain data that is two years old, and most of the maps are illegible - they have been inserted in the document at too small a scale and as raster images, rather than vector images, and thus the legends and annotations of place names on most of the maps cannot be read. They need to be redone using vector graphics (eg SVG or EPS) versions of the maps. This may seem pedantic but there is no point in including maps that are basically illegible.

Section 5.1.2 identifies Shooters Hill as a high population area worthy of priority non Fixed Wireless investment. Is that really the case? There are remarkably few inhabited dwellings in Shooters Hill, and it is already has a 4G/5G communications tower on Tower Rd and thus has adequate 4G/5G connectivity as a result. There are many other localities on Oberon LGA which surely should be prioritised over Shooters Hill.

Section 6

The extremely general statements in this section are reasonable, but it should be mentioned that a key requirement for digital services to enable economic development is adequate upload bandwidth and low-latency network connections. Residential digital consumers typically require high bandwidth download speeds to allow them to consume digital content, but businesses require a much more symmetrical connectivity, with fast upload/outgoing speeds with low latency, to enable them to host or participate in B2B (business-to-business) systems as well as provide or manage business-to-consumer systems. The need for symmetrical download/upload access is even more critical for primarily digital businesses based in Oberon LGA. The lower business premise and other operational costs in Oberon, as well as lifestyle advantages, makes it a potentially attractive venue for some types of digital-first businesses, but only if symmetrical digital connectivity is readily available.

Section 8.1

The second sentence is truncated and does not make sense. Again, proof-reading of such documents by Council personnel prior to public consultation is a reasonable expectation. Oberon Council could readily engage with local community-based organisations to help with such tasks on a voluntary basis if its internal resources are insufficient to carry out such quality assurance activities.

Section 8.4

This section mentions the need for support for local students to have adequate home internet access. However, nowhere in the document is fast broadband (ie fibre optic) digital access by schools and training organisations assessed. If there are gaps in such access, this should surely be a priority, but this important issue has not been assessed at all in the Plan.

Section 9

There is no mention of the desirability of diversified communication capabilities in the event of natural or other disasters. All of the discussion in this section is about nbn services. However, it makes immense sense for key emergency services and other community organisation to acquire the ability to fall back to alternative, diversified satellite-based digital communication services, such as StarLink. StarLink now offers lower-but-adequate bandwidth stand-by services at very low cost using equipment that can be readily be powered by battery back-up systems at each access point (including vehicle-mounted access points). In addition, mobile phone providers such as Apple now offer emergency satellite text communication facilities which are completely independent of non services. Consideration of these need to be included in the Plan.

Section 10

Recommendation 1, that project proponents of State Significant Developments should invest in additional capacity across broadband networks, is strongly supported, but this recommendation should be more specific and mention the $4 billion+ proposed Pines Wind Farm development, to be located in the remote southern and south-western parts of Oberon LGA. The recommendation should require that he Pines project specifically contribute to addressing the digital communication gaps and future requirements in that part of the LGA, particularly improving digital access in the communities of Black Springs and Dog Rocks, as well as smaller hamlets, and possibly funding community-based initiatives as discussed at the end of these comments.

Recommendation 2: see above comments for Recommendation 1.

Other recommendations: please see specific comments above.

What is missing from the Plan

We have already noted the complete absence of any mention, let alone discussion or consideration of non-nbn services such as StarLink or the forthcoming Amazon LEO satellite site, or the satellite emergency connectivity provided by smart phone vendors such as Apple. This needs to be corrected. It is not acceptable for a Council document to be entirely partisan towards specific commercial entities, specifically nbn and Telstra.

However, the major omission from the Plan is the lack of any mention or consideration of Internet-of-Things (IoT) services. These are low-bandwidth digital communication channels that allow cheap, slow but reliable bidirectional communication of small digital payloads over alternative wireless broadband channels. Such services are increasingly important for a wide range of industries and enterprises, but have particular relevance to primary industries, where they can and are being widely used for digital monitoring of sensor data, covering a wide range of things such as soil moisture sensors, weather stations, air quality sensors (and smoke and bushfire early-warning systems), stock GPS-enabled movement sensors and farm gate open/closed sensors, and biodiversity monitoring sensors and systems. IoT is a major digital growth sector of obvious and particular relevance to Oberon LGA, and is also a sector ideally suited to new local small businesses and start-ups to provide equipment and value-added services.

Current IoT services fall into two main classes:

a) LTE Cat-M (also known as LTE-M) and NB-IoT services, which utilise gaps between channels in the existing 4G/5G networks to allow lower-bandwidth (in the case of LTE Cat-M) and very low-bandwidth (in the case of NB-IoT) communications over very wide areas, including areas in which traditional 4G/5G services are not accessible, even with fixed antennas. In fact. LTE Cat-M and NB-IoT services already cover almost all of Oberon LGA, including the remotest locations, according to coverage maps published by Telstra. Telstra is the sole provider of LTE Cat-M and NB-IoT services in Australia, but these services are not well promoted (perhaps because they are not particularly profitable to Telstra) and remain difficult to access, particularly by small businesses including individual farmers or community organisations. Access is currently via Telstra Business Services, who are reluctant to engage with "small players", or via just a handful of third party on-sellers who are inefficient and unreliable. This is a major gap, and solving this would provide a major growth opportunity for small and start-up businesses in regional centres like Oberon. However, there needs to be explicit co-operation agreements between local councils and Telstra, as the sole supplier, to ensure that local residents, particularly primary producers, and local start-up digital businesses, can easily access these facilities.

b) civil-sector and community low-bandwidth IoT networks such as LoRa (and LoRaWAN), and increasingly 802.11ah protocol HaLow sub-1 GHz long-range wi-fi. The technology used by LoRa networks is well established and cheap, and can provide very reliable but low-bandwidth connectivity for small data payloads (such as water tank levels or air quality metrics etc) over distances of many kilometres, and which can be implemented as network meshes to extend that range. Typically LoRa communications rely on fixed base stations which provide wide-area connectivity, such as over an entire 100+ hectare property or to an entire hamlet or valley community, with uplink to the wider Internet via nbn fixed Wireless, nbn SkyMesh or StarLink satellite services at the base station. Multiple base stations can be established to provide seamless coverage of larger areas. Base station hardware and software costs as little as $1000 per site and peripheral sensor devices using LoRa communication with those base stations as little as $50 each, with potential to develop local versions of such devices at low cost. Thus there is real opportunity for establishing community-owned-and-operated LoRa and LoRaWAN networks, as well as local start-ups to service such deployments and develop value-added products and service around them, with obvious applicability to almost every rural and remote LGA in Australia. The failure to even mention this possibility in the draft Plan should be addressed.

I hope Council finds this feedback helpful, and I urge Council to engage at the earliest opportunity with community organisation with appropriate expertise to help it develop such documents without relying entirely on commercial vendors and other interested parties.

Tim Churches
President, Oberon Citizen Science Network Incorporated
https://oberon-citizen.scince

Precinct master planning Oberon housing strategy 2025 .
I would prefer the O’Connell Masterplan Opion 1 - keep existing settlement pattern ( map 4 )