John Linton .......impacts on networks........none so far.
I had a look at the 'impact' of the 60 or so Point Cook fibre users on the links between Telstra and Exetel in Melbourne and there were none that I could see. Of course 60+ users are a tiny sample but you would expect to see some sort of impact on the link which is also used to carry the ADSL1 traffic between Telstra ADSL1 users and Exetel. We added the fibre users without making any change to the link that was already in place and there is no noticeable difference to the minute by minute usage. All well and good. It doesn't mean much in that aspect of the 'transition' between proving services over much faster fibre than copper so far.
I was more interested in the amount of the average download that would occur once a user had 'super fast fibre'. Again nothing seemed to change from our point of view as a provider. The Exetel ADSL customers who changed to fibre didn't seem to increase their downloads in any way and the new customers (the majority) averaged less than 10 gb with almost half averaging less than 5 gb. With only 60 or so customers from one very small area these early results are not really indicative of anything but it will be useful to compare the July usage with June usage for those customers who have had the service for a full two months.
We will connect the first NBN Tasmanian customers before the end of this month (I never expected to say this but there is a more bureaucratic and slow moving communications company in Australia than Telstra) and I will be particularly interested in the download profiles of the customers who have signed up with Exetel compared to the Point Cook customers. Both back haul and IP costs are horrendously high in Tasmania (4 to 5 times more expensive than mainland services) so it's going to be a critical factor moving forward in that State. We have made no allowance for any significant impact of fibre customers in the current financial year because, even with an election now only five weeks away (which will settle the future of the 'NBN2'), it is still too hard to determine whether or not there will be any alternative fibre offers from either Telstra or Optus and therefore what time frames may be involved.
On balance, and not getting 'carried away' with the current 'results', I think that the current largest providers of ADSL services will have many more problems to deal with than companies of Exetel's size if/when fibre alternatives to ADSL become more commonly available. Like the possible opportunities in Sri Lanka (in a completely different way) it would be nice to be 'first' into a new service area rather than last and be able to provide services on a different basis to the largest companies who have a great deal to protect and less 'room to manouvre' than a company of Exetel's size has. Not that we expect to get much market share but it will be far easier to 'compete' with much larger companies whose efforts, no matter how anyone tries to spin it, are going to be far more 'fractured' than our own.
I think, generally speaking, that wireless broadband poses similar problems to the largest ADSL providers and I have held that view for over three years now. The continuing growth of wireless broadband usage has gone pretty much the way every knowledgeable person around the world predicted it would go with those predictions saying that downloads via wireless broadband would exceed those of ADSL by the end of 2011. So much for the silly and totally ignorant expert's claims that "there will never be enough wireless spectrum for wireless to take over from ADSL".....as Dr Ian Malcolm once famously said: "life will find a way" and he was only a character in a pot boiler. Meanwhile our immediate problem is to find a way of 'staying in the game' as a sensible provider of wireless services amid the carnage that appears to be today's wireless market places. To do that we either need our current carrier to provide services more logically or we need to find a different carrier.....I am leaning towards the second alternative as the more likely at this particular time.
It's a beautiful, sunny Sydney winter's day so I am deferring any further work for an hour or so.
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