John Linton .....no - it's just a strangely shaped low lying cloud.
Just something that passes through your mind on most landings and take offs at Colombo airport since we have been coming here - and the airport is a favourite target for the LTTE even now the full scale war is virtually at an end. But we landed safely and courtesy of the lack of traffic on a Sunday morning got to our hotel in record time.We were greeted as long lost friends by Adrian, the 'floor manager' and the check in staff and it was nice to be greeted so warmly - professionally charming or not.
My SLT wireless internet still works and is much quicker than my Optus/Exetel service in Australia with the SLT (Sri Lanka Telecom) network now at 14.4 mbps (or higher) in most of Colombo but it has some sort of problem in dropping out at the hotel we are staying in so I am having to use the expensive hotel service to write this. SLT's prices have dropped quite considerably since we were last here with a 14.4 mbps service with 5 gbs of traffic costing the equivalent of half what we charge in Australia though you have to take in to consideration the disparity between average take home pay in the two countries. As a further comparison their unlimited download ADSL1 plans are around $A35.00 per month.
A colleague in Sydney sent me a reference to the latest on LTE:
http://www.betanews.com/article/Verizon-Wireless-LTE-deployment-will-be-ready-in-2H-2010-says-CEO/1242409436
and a brief reference to the status of the VoLGA standards that may be in place before mid-2010 - at least in the EU and, presumably S E Asia. I've been logging in to some of the web casts and I'm trying to find the site for the Berlin symposium starting tomorrow to see just what may be possible in the not too distant future in delivering 'standard telephony over LTE/4G or whatever it will eventually be called. While I realise that Optus may not be able to deliver LTE for some time, if ever, it will certainly be deliverable in other countries, including the UK, and more than likely in Sri Lanka and Indonesia and we have some interest in those countries in the not too distant future perhaps.
It's still very early in Exetels provision of HSPA services in Australia to make any real prediction of how well the Optus HSPA nertwork will develop and just what it can be used for in terms of the various demographics. We 'need' VoIP to work well over HSPA as we think that getting rid of the end user's land line is going to be a key part of the 'selling price equation'. As those people who use or are familiar with Exetel's efforts with VoIP over the past three years would know - we have made a lot of progress in providing VoIP at the lowest prices in Australia (for some user demographic call mixes) via the 100 free wire line calls and the free SMS and free FAX services that are targeted (in the longer term) at the residential user replacing their wire line services, with a wireless service that is able to also offer additional services at lower costs than any other ISP/communications service provider.
I don't use GSM mobile to make calls from my mobile and haven't done for over 6 months and am more than happy with the results I get - basically neither I nor the person I'm calling can notice any difference. That, in itself, is a pretty fair indication of where the technology is going but the things that Verizon, and others, are now talking about are far more far reaching in any number of future scenarios. Irrespective of the 'back of a bus ticket' wild estimates of the cost, the time frame and the sheer logistics of Labor's NBN2 and therefore all the craziness that will inevitably go with it, the real facts of today are that most Australians will neither need nor be able to afford a fibre communications service in my life time.
Whether ADSL2, with all its Telstra generated pricing baggage, can be delivered more cost effectively in the interim is a question that I haven't heard anyone in this industry address in any detail - the few that have talked on the subject wouldn't be out of place at a Labor cabinet meeting given their preference for false logic and rhetoric over demonstrable fact and careful analysis with credible costings and planning horizons. HSPA is at least currently only an ADSL1 type of service in terms of data but with some very interesting telephone capabilities. However, and understanding that any current opinion is now redundant until such time as a credible time frame an actual build plan for an NBN2 is in place (if in fact that ever transpires), any planning that incorporates the future development of HSPA into 4G/LTE in Australia is a waste of time.
The joker in the pack (no pun or other reference intended) is that VoIP over wireless (should that become widely possible) makes all of the current ADSL2 (and ADSL1 for that matter) roll outs/add ons/network widening/whatever highly suspect as all of the companies involved in such roll outs are, one way or another, dependent (either directly or indirectly) on Telstra or a few others receiving wire line rental and wire line call revenues and therefore, pretty much the same Australian carriers are being forced to make decisions, today, on whether they allow their new wireless technologies to deliver voice calls because if they do then they need to scrap the basis on which they have been building out wire line based services.
Interesting scenario for Australian carriers and some few others. Whatever they do with broad band data over fibre/copper/cable poses significant problems for their 'other' service - mobile and wire line voice calls - and of course vice versa. Throw in the new Australian government owned carrier and the whole planning scenario becomes near enough impossible which, as any person who has been around the Australian communications industry for the past twenty to thirty years (or has read about it) knows only leads to one outcome.
Nobody invests a cent in anything.