With the advent of high speed broadband, RDA Far West NSW and Broken Hill City Council foresee a bright future for our communities with thriving industry sectors in creative services, mining and education. Our households in towns and in the most rural areas will be engaged and the people in our region will have access to the best health and education services available.
We believe this region should be prioritised due to our current lack of infrastructure and also due to our community’s readiness to adopt high speed broadband technology.
We recognise that we as a community need to prepare for the digital future. Therefore, as the reader will have observed, each section in this document lists actions for implementation. During the consultation process in the development of this strategy, we incorporated ideas from local community. All ideas will be reviewed and may be listed as action items in this digital economy strategy document.
To conclude this report we have listed below the actions we feel are most important. These are the actions the RDA Far West NSW and key local stakeholders believe must be undertaken as a priority:
Actions
| What do we want to do | Why | Who will do it | When | Resources |
| Appoint a project officer to lead an NBN rollout working group for BHCC operations. | Accelerate engagement with NBN Co and prepare Broken Hill for high speed broadband. | BHCC | ongoing | BHCC, other external support as identified |
| Develop the Film Studio as a high speed broadband test site | This will show the potential of the internet and kick-start the development of the film precinct | BHCC, RDA Far West NSW | ongoing | Funding will be actively sought |
| Have a standardised approach to attracting university students to the region. At present no single register of all the universities sending students to Broken Hill exists. The BHUDRH initiative is one of the most well known and accessed university programs in the area. Many others have not been documented. | A documented process for attracting universities to send students to the region will assist in systematically increasing the number of students spending time in Broken Hill and Far West NSW. The social and professional exchanges are of great benefit to all parties. | RDA Far West NSW will communicate with universities to identify current formal and informal programs in the region. | ongoing | RDA Far West NSW, BHCC, BHUDRH, others |
