Maria Hawthorne in Brisbane | November 15, 2007

FEDERAL Education Minister Julie Bishop has dismissed Labor leader Kevin Rudd's $1 billion plan to create digital classrooms, saying schools across Australia are well-equipped with computers.

Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop says there's nothing remotely revolutionary about Labor's digital schools plan. Picture: David Geraghty

"What Kevin Rudd has done is raise expectations through the roof all year promising he'd come up with innovative and original thinking but when the time came to deliver he failed," Ms Bishop told ABC Radio today.

"He's clearly vacated the field of new ideas and there was nothing remotely revolutionary in anything he had to say."

Yesterday, Mr Rudd pledged to deliver a computer for every Australian student in years 9 to 12, amongst a raft of initiatives to ensure students had world-class internet access.

Ms Bishop said schools already had an adequate number of PCs in place.

"I visit schools all across Australia I'm yet to see a school that is not well served with computers."

A 2003 Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report found Australian students had "universal access" to computers, she said.

Samantha Maiden | November 15, 2007

KEVIN Rudd has pledged to double the number of scholarships for undergraduates and students undertaking a doctorate.

The plan announced yesterday will create two new categories of scholarships to tackle the skills crisis and to help students relocating interstate to study a specialist course not available at home.

The Opposition Leader will also tackle the brain drain with a plan to stop researchers from being poached by overseas universities through a scheme of generous fellowships. "Universities are critical to the education revolution that Australia so urgently needs," Mr Rudd said at the Labor launch. "Australia is the only country in the OECD to have disinvested in our universities in the past decade. This has got to stop. It has got to stop now.

"Undoing the damage which this Government has done to our universities will not be easy. But this challenge begins today."

Vice-chancellors welcomed the plan last night, but said Mr Rudd must detail his compensation plan to abolish full-fee degrees.

Selina Mitchell | November 15, 2007

COMPUTER experts are confident $1 billion would be plenty of money to supply one million secondary students with computers at school.

But they warned some of the money on offer from Labor's computer fund would need to be quarantined to ensure the technology was properly maintained.

Experts also warned the scheme – and Labor's plan to connect 9000 schools across the country to a national broadband network – would need continuous funding to ensure the technology kept up with the improvements in computing power.

Labor will tie a rollout of broadband infrastructure for schools, costed at $100 million, to its $4.7 billion national broadband network announced earlier this year. Tenders for the work, for which Telstra and the G9 consortium have already said they are interested in bidding, are likely to be issued within the first six months of a Labor government.

It plans to have the network completed by 2013, with fibre optics used in cities and towns (supplying speeds of up to 100 megabits per second) and a combination of fixed-line, satellite and wireless technologies for more remote areas.

Different technologies will provide different speeds and qualities of access, Australian National University senior lecturer Sigi Goode said.

Dr Goode said schools in more remote areas might get a lesser service. Satellite doesn't usually mean lower speeds, but there can be delays with the supply of the data in real time, he said.

Many city schools have some computers linked to the internet, but access speeds as well as the numbers of computers vary considerably.

Andrew Colley | November 15, 2007

TELSTRA is on a collision course with the competition regulator after the third largest internet service provider launched a broadband ADSL service that sidesteps part of the carrier's copper network charging regime.

Perth-based iiNet has launched a national broadband and internet telephony service that allows consumers to bypass fees for voice services currently built into rentals for Telstra and Optus copper phone lines.

However, about 500,000 consumers who now receive ADSL service under line-sharing arrangements with Optus and Telstra could be struggling to make the switch.

The service has been made possible by a series of interim pricing decisions for unbundled local loop (ULL) services published by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in mid-2006.

The iiNet service is the first of its kind to take advantage of new rules that require Telstra and Optus to make their copper lines available without standard voice services attached.

Iinet managing director Michael Malone said, however, that Telstra was yet to put procedures in place for migrating customers to unbundled lines. "The only way now for one of our customers to get that is to disconnect the current line and connect a new one. That's expensive and it also involves a couple of weeks of downtime.

"In the draft determination they've included pricing for migration but as yet Telstra hasn't implemented the process," Mr Malone said.

Optus declined to comment on the new service.