Sunday, August 24. 2008Is HSPA Being "Over Sold?"John Linton It seems that the customer testing of the Optus HSPA network is going well - as you would expect it to using technically competent broadband users. Our own personnel are also finding out interesting aspects of HSPA - not all of them positive of course as it's a service that because of its nature is dependent on location, building structure and usage by others in the area/closest tower. As in the UK, but not as widely divergent, the performance varies even in the same location and by type of usage. As in the UK the initial latency is 90 ms or so and makes playing some games not possible but, strangely, doesn't seem to affect VoIP anything like as much as it might be expected to. The other great result, so far, has been the ability to use VoIP from a suitable mobile phone handset which will prove to be a very useful function if it 'holds up' over wider testing. So, so far, the Optus HSPA service has lived up to the optimisitc end of our hopes for it. There is a lot more testing to do and on a much wider scale but - so far so good. We now need to finalise the 'plans' we will offer when we release the service commercially. I was interested to see Telstra signalling that their initial sky high charging "because we can" plans have finally run out of steam (presumably because of competition from Optus and Vodafone) as set out in their media release: http://www.telstra.com.au/abouttelstra/media/announcements_article.cfm?ObjectID=43222 I guess Telstra's lawyers are getting lax on checking the wording of Telstra media releases or alternatively Telstra has/have commercial espionage access to the detailed plans and actions of their mobile carrier rivals to allow a statement like this to be made: "Mr Justin Milne, said customers value the wireless broadband service, which uses the Telstra Next G™ network, from Australia's leading internet service provider which is growing four times faster than its nearest competitor." Now the 'new/lower' pricing that Telstra has announced is still way more expensive than that of the other three carriers: BigPond Wireless Broadband plans effective 24 August 2008:
especially the absolute 'killer" of: Additional usage charged at $0.25/MB (which is a charge of $250.00 per gb over any plan's alowance). What's more interesting is that there is a 10 gb plan at the very reasonable price of $129.00 a month making it much lower cost per gb than any of its 'rivals' and sinalling another not toodistant future change in what end users will see in HSPA pricing 'positoning'. Of course there are the usual 'catches' in these latest offerings (as there are for almost all carrier offerings) like very long contracts and the need to bundle in a range of other services that are priced sky high but Telstra, like the other carriers, seems to pitch all its expensive advertising campaigns at people too dumb to work out the total price of taking up their latest "amazing offers" and seeing they've all been doing it so long, and presumably so successfully, Australian mobile service buyers really are as stupid as these ads assume they are. A year ago I made the comment that the HSPA market would be characterised by the usual 'death spiral' of lower pricing for more apparent content between Telstra and Optus/Vodafone which has characterised those companies mobile phone wars of attrition over the past ten years and you didn't have to be too bright to see that coming - and so it has come to pass with more on the way. Personally, and I could obviously be wrong, I think that alll of the carriers have got it quite wrong - based on my own use of HSPA and the early testing being done at the moment by Exetel personnel and customers. Why do I say this? Because: 1. the current state of HSPA (including the Telstra service being used by my eldest daughter) isn't, at least not yet, an ADSL replacement at the 5 - 10 gb per month level that is being "pitched" by the carriers - the latency and variable second by second performance makes playing games or live video far from acceptable let alone ideal as has come to be the expectation from that user demographic. 2. the use of VoIP by an increasing number of HSPA users will remove the expected profits (that are planned to subsidise the very high data allowances in some of the plans) from the very high priced mobile call plans that seem to be the 'norm' for HSPA sims. I I have little/no knowledge of the actualities of why the carriers are pitching the current implementations of HSPA as an ADSL replacement but, from what I have used and seen, it isn't close to that status at this time (either here or in the UK). As the build outs continue to happen and the speeds reach ever higher sustainable levels then it will be an ADSL replacement at the 5+ gb per month level but I don't see that being the case today. Trackbacks
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There is an interesting article on using "Big Pond Maths" to make the 10GB plan possibly be more worthwhile -- even if you cancel at the end of the 12 month half price period.
See this article: http://apcmag.com/save_money__use_bigpond_maths.htm Comment (1)
I don't know who would need to use 10GB when travelling. For $129.95 per month, you could have 3-4 ADSL connections, each with 5-6x as much quota.
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its worth noting that the "new 10GB wireless plan" already existed for "Telstra" customers, just not Bigpond customers, although from memory i think it was about the 179$ P/M mark.
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I think the Exetel offer will be a no brainer for any dialup user or low end DSL user and there are a great deal of those, the startup price if a modem is needed is perhaps a bit of a hurdle for some but may come down over time, hardware costs do fall with volume but being early days in our market the carriers are still banking the extra cash, it will change with time at the hands of one of the marketing departments I'm sure
With the startup costs being prohibitive to some I also see a market for the Exetel offer for the mobile as a modem, iPhone, laptop, business customer, being involved in the trial of this service I can see already that some of these services could benefit from this offer, personally I will be adding one of these SIM's to my account as soon as they become available Comments (3)
We could offer a higher monthly access cost ($A12.50) for 24 months to cover the cost of the USB device and have only a $25.00 activation fee.
With a buy price of $A160.00 plus shipping cost plus sim cost there is no room, for us, to move from a $A190ish activation fee for the USB/SIM/shiping cost. Comments (2)
that slightly higher monthly cost is probably a good option that could be offered so consumers could choose up front cost or spread the cost, I understand the price is where it needs to be based on what you have to pay for it currently, unfortunately all the carriers have too much of a profit margin added to the hardware component at this stage
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CryptWizard: the 10GB plans are probably best suited to businesses who might share the SIMs between staff so each SIM might actually get constant use.
One thing to note is that Telstra's 3G network is significantly faster than Virgin (and Optus, if there is no differentiated service between the two). I borrowed a Telstra NextG modem from work last December and was easily able to get 100+kB/sec out of it (on the Gold Coast), whereas my Virgin 3G modem right now typically averages around 30-40kB/sec (in Sydney CBD). So depending on how long/frequently you use the thing over a month it may/may not be possible to exhaust the larger quotas. Comment (1)
the optus sims we are testing are getting 100+ kB/s and thats on the forgotten island of Tasmania.
see => http://cody3g.blogs.exetel.com.au/ Comment (1)
From what I understand (only what I've been told, I can't confirm it) although Virgin is a part of the Optus network they are said to throttle the access which slows things down, they do use different APN's so quite possible in theory, this could be the case as I do get much faster speeds consistently with the Optus SIM than what users of the Virgin offer report, for comparison the speeds in Sydney on the Optus version would fall somewhere in between a 512 to a 1500 ADSL service and sometimes even better
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