BROADBAND will be worth millions of dollars to the city but risks being a huge flop without a major business education campaign, says a software designer.

Launceston-based autech Software and Design chief executive Darren Alexander said the Federal Government's broadband rollout would deliver a world-class service.

Mr Alexander said because it was starting in Tasmania, the state would have a two-year headstart on the rest of the country.

But he said leading commerce groups and individual businesses had to be educated by the Federal Government about the network's potential, otherwise the taxpayer investment could be wasted.

Mr Alexander said Tasmanian business had a long way to go to become fully connected to the world.

He said only 18 per cent of Tasmanian small businesses had a website and of that number, only six per cent offered online transactions.

Mr Alexander said this figure had to increase to at least 70 per cent of businesses with a website and 60 per cent with online transactions for the city to have a meaningful export capacity.

The rollout would not greatly change the city's look - it was just a network of buried fibre optic cables connecting buildings - but Mr Alexander said it could change the future.

He said the network could offer data speeds of 100 megabits a second, many times faster than existing services.

This would give businesses the chance to offer the world huge amounts of information about products and services.

Mr Alexander said examples could be a bakery offering images of products baked that day with incentives to buy.

Or an education provider could stream video of a lecture in real time, without the stop-start presentation now experienced on the internet.

Mr Alexander said the network would be an "enabler", allowing businesses to present their services to customers around the world.

He said the network would be like a new road, but a road was was only useful if vehicles drove on it and the network needed people to put content on it.

So Mr Alexander said it was vital the Federal Government educated businesses to extract full value from the network.

•Have your say, e-mail to times@ examiner.com.au or post to PO Box 99 Launceston 7250.