John Linton We arrived in Singapore for an overnight stay yesterday evening (there are no was of getting to Colombo from Australia without long connection times) so we used the hotels internet and caught up on the local HSPA scene which has further develope since we were here in the second half of 2008.
My local HSPA service now connects at over 11 mbps and according to the service provider's web site they expect to get to over 20 mbps in the second half of 2009. Their data prices have also halved since we were here last year, not that's saying much as its a very expensive low usage service that I bought to trial just before we 'went live' in Australia. As with the Australian service it delivers 'perfect' VoIP for me and the speed is twice what I currently get from the Opus/Exetel service in Sydney (around 5 mbps).
I noticed this article about Telstra's imminent 'release' of a 21 mbps upgrade to their Australian HSPA service:
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/23225/127/
which will be interesting to see just what they make available and where and what new data rates they will provide when they do activate it. I suppose it will be even more interesting to me to see what Optus and Vodafone do in terms of the capabilities of their HSPA netwrks and how they disentangle themselves from each other in terms of their capital city sharing arrangements.
I won't have time to find the right people to talk with at the HSPA supplier here but it's very high on my priority list to increase my knowledge of just what LTE wil provide in the EU and how the 'user density' arguments against LTE being the ultimate broadband data network for residential users really stack up. As I've said before I had no problems using HSPA at any time of the day or night in the centre of London which has a densely congregated populaion of UK residents and a huge number of visiting business users that is equivalent to half the population of Australia - but I would like some facts.
Exetel now has more than 1,500 HSPA users and, from what I can determine from our forums, emails direct to me and what our support people tell me, the overall satifaction with our version of the Optus HSPA service is overwhelming happiness - however these are very early days and I am basically only getting anecdotal feed back - except for my own use of both mobile VoIP and my note book - both of which have been flawless since I activated them.
My view is that Telstra will make a huge effort to promote their version of HSPA if for no other reason that to show the Labor Government the error of their ways in disqualifying them from the "NBN" but also to attempt to increase their 'lead' over Optus and Vodafone in this key new market. Frankly, I will be surprised if Telstra can actually bring themselves to offer a high speed HSPA service with data rates that make it useful/even usable for the majority of users but Ive been surprised before.
I have never been able to work out why Telstra has continued to rip off all types of users from the smallest residential user to the very largest corporate user despite almost 20 years of 'competition'. I suppose in reality there never has been much competition with successive 'entrants (except in mobile) being content to use Telstra's 'pricing umbrella' to offer a slightly discounted version of Telstra's sky high pricing rather than go with a sensible cost+ pricing strategy.
This has been very much on my mind recently as we put in place our 'corporate' sales processes and, once again, realise that Exetel's base pricing for business users continues to be around 50% of the next lowest cost provider and remains at around 20% of the prices that Telstra offer business users even when they take their "whole of business" discounts in to consideration. Then I realise that the head of Telstra Wholesale, alone, is paid more money that the total of Exetel's annual payroll (in both Australia and Sri Lanka) and that's beore "performance bonuses". With overheads like that (and all it implies) it must be difficult to make a sensibly priced offering to an end user and of courseit's fortunate that their remain so many end user decision makers who are payng their Telstra bills with OPM - would it be a different story if they were using their own money?
It seems to me theat the biggest factor in the possible success that HSPA will have in replacing ADSL at the lower end usage levels is the fact that Telstra continues to ensure that ADSL2 is priced so ridiculously high and has now successfully gelded those timorous ISPs who started their own ADSL2 roll outs by signing them up as Telstra ADSL2 resellers while starting to push their HSPA higher speeds as logical replacements for ADSL2.
Something to ponder on.