John Linton I haven't looked at the mobile broadband market lately as much as I used to. This has been partly because of time constraints and partly because of Exetel's lack of ability to develop any sort of 'marketing plan' that allows us to meet a carrier's needs for high volumes of unit sales to mass markets. Our current users, particularly the premium users, seem to like what we provide and the prices at which we provide it and business users tend to stay with their Exetel services and gradually increase the number of services they use while residential customers tend to come and go. While I was in the EU recently my brief observations were that coverage and speed had continued to improve and costs had continued to fall - however my needs have always been covered each year for sub twenty pounds reaching a new low this year of five pounds for wifi connectivity (to the ubiquitous BTZone) for 24 user hours which was more than I need for two weeks of emailing, blogging and intranet usage.
Telstra have recently set the price standard in Australia of $A29.95 for either 4 gb of traffic (up and down) or 5 gb for the same price on a 'promotional' deal. Given their 'legitimate' claims to having the widest coverage and the fastest speed it will be pretty tough for Optus and Vodafone to compete with given both those companies current retail and wholesale pricing. It seems highly likely, even if there is a change of Federal Government at the next election that Telstra will continue to place more emphasis on mobile telephony (if that is in fact possible) and especially on mobile broadband from now to any 'denouement' of just what the 'NBN2' will turn out to be. The obvious advantage of mobile broadband in several major market sectors could continue to be leveraged by Telstra to the huge disadvantage of 'NBN2'....possibly terminal disadvantage.
If, as seems likely, 5 gb at $20 - $30 per month with no need for a PSTN line will become readily available in the not too distant future then the take up of MBB as a replacement for ADSL will undoubtedly increase at the lower end of the usage scale. A rough estimate of our own customer usage indicates that over 10% of our residential data users are wireless subscribers who increasingly discontinue their PSTN services. If that percentage increases, for all ISPs, then it would significantly change the current market demographics. It is ppointless to aver, as so many ignorant people do, that "wireless will never replace wire line" - the unambivalent fact is that it has done and continues to do so in the market sectors where it has happened and is happening. How big those market sectors may be is not known to me but you don't have to speculate too wildly to say that it is likely to be some 30% or greater than the the current total ADSL market.
Whatever happens over the coming year, I would put money on a quickening of mobile broadband replacing ADSL as well as a quickening of usage of data applications on telephone hand sets that used to be solely on ADSL services. Who will supply such mobile broadband services is much tougher to answer. If I was an Optus or Vodafone mobile broadband product manager I would be extremely uneasy.An Exetel mobile broadband product manager would probably be even less easy as they contemplate the future. I don't know whether Exetel can find a way of increasing our, profitable, provision of mobile broadband services but if we can't then we will not invest more money in trying to do that.
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