Sunday, September 14. 2008So - HSPA - "A New Hope".....John Linton .....is this truly the beginning of the end of the evil Empire? (apologies to Ronald Reagan and George Lucas) I finished the details of the HSPA release for later today in terms of the balance of September earlier this morning and now have a 'free' Sunday - which is nice. We will take it very easy for the balance of September to ensure that the systems we have developed over the past three months work fully effectively and that Optus actually has some systems at the other end of the 'line' and actually have everything else in place that I now have more than a few misgivings about. It seems that Exetel and me in particular have been looking to put an HSPA service in place for as long as Exetel has existed which is pretty true as I never believed that Exetel, or any other very small start up company had any long term future based on being invoved in a monopoly's sourced services. It was only 7 months after Exetel 'opened for business' that we signed a five year contract to offer the Unwired wireless service in Sydney (at that time the service was planned to expand to every capital city in Australia and several major regional areas). Unfortunately that didn't work out and nor did the several other start up Australian wireless options we looked at over the past four years. I've commented before in these ramblings about the frustrations, brick walls and too soon to be snuffed out hopes raised and dashed as I loooked for wireless solutions in Australia and then in Asia and the USA and finally in the EU. While we still have almost 1,000 Unwired customers in Sydney, and some of those are well in to their fourth year of using the service, Unwired itself never ever got its 'go to market' strategies, or even tactics, right and employed a series of lamentably under qualified drones to waste tens of millions of dollars producing one of the worst examples of butchering a good idea that, for once was very well funded, ever seen in Australia - on a much smaller scale it ranks as Australia's entry (Motorola's Iridium satellite project stands supreme and unqestioned as the all time winner) for the award of the greatest f*** up of a truly great concept by dopey people in communications history. HSPA has all the key ingredients to become a 'quantum leap' or a 'paradigm shift' or a 'sea change' or whatever stupid tag someone or other wants to apply to the relentless progress of technology. Just as mobile telephony is driving wire line telephony in to a 'niche' in voice communications, HSPA, and LTE, have the same potential and, unlike all previous 'attempts to break down the Telstra monopoly' - the fact that HSAP/LTE is a 'standard' and world wide change across all markets and, in Australia is supported by all mobile carriers - there appears to be no going back from here. So - as Harry Callaghan once said in the early 1970s - "how lucky do you feel?" Apart from all the other uncertainties introduced in to the HSPA release over the past few days the one great unknown is - of course - how many of these services will people buy from Exetel? Normally in using a base service and adding value to it this is not a major concern. With HSPA there is a concern and that is the 'investment' needed to be made in HSPA hardware and, where that hardware should be sourced to ensure that when someone orders a service we have the hardware required. If we were to source hardware to cover the high end of our forecast of our HSPA sales we would need to set aside/find more than $A1.5 million 'up front' which is 'doable' but tough for a small company. The risks (if sales are much less than forecast) are quite considerable to our cashflow and as we have never used debt to operate our business takes us to new 'ground' and levels of concern. We have taken a very cautious approach and we desperately need real figures to be able to make realistic decisions over the next 6 weeks in terms of the number of modems we need to source and where we need to source them from. It's unlikely that OPtus will prove to be an effective source because of their high prices and long delivery times (their delivery is 3 - 4 times longer than actually getting the units direct from the same factory!). So maybe I won't get my 'free Sunday' after all. Trackbacks
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One question regarding the release out of curiosity. Are you guys doing a layer 3 service from Optus or layer 2?
Cheers. Comment (1)
as one of the HSPA testers I found the service to be excellent in terms of stability - not one dropout.
A realist download speed of 100KB/s could be expected, peaking up to an amazing 450KB/s on certain downloads. I was wondering will Exetel be offering some form of HSPA Modem / Router to allow networking at home. The ideal option would be Modem / wireless router. - it seems to me that most homes have more than one computer and the HSPA I tested would easily handle multiple users for internet browsing / banking and some downloading. Comment (1)
We will find a suitable modem/router over the coming two weeks or so.
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Look at this software.
"JoikuSpot turns your phone to a mobile WLAN HotSpot." It cost about 15Euros http://www.joikuspot.com/?lang=en Maybe JL could organise a bulk discount and we pay in AUD. I am looking at this for myself. You use the phone as normal with VOIP call. Turn the software on and you can connect your laptop to your phone via Wifi. Nothing extra to carry. Comment (1)
John I'm fascinated and quite excited by your comments about HSPA because if true we may truly see the true multi-modal competition that is needed to break the back of the "fixed line monopoly" impasse we seem to have in Australia. But there are many sceptics about HSPA and some seem to think that if it becomes too successful the tech simply won't be able to handle the demand. In other words, it lacks scabality. What do you say to that?
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The short answer is I don't know. The time I spent using HSPA in the UK seemed to indicate that their 50 million population wasn't impacting the speeds as far as I could tell.
The papers I've read on LTE demonstrate the amount of throughput achievable and why it's enough to sustain commercial deployments of 100 mbps networks. Remember - "technology always finds a way". If you don't believe that remember that Telstra used to state in the early 1970s that the maximum sustainable speed over a copper pair was 2,400 'baud'. Comments (4)
I don't believe scalability to be a problem, certainly not one that is limited by technology anyway. I'm currently in China and I use China Mobile here, they have had a CDMA based internet service available for some time and have just launched 3G into the market and it is currently in growth phase, keep in mind that China Mobile is the largest telco here and currently have 550 million active users and the service has been rolling out and coping with demand, although only early days for their 3G offer I'm sure it dwarfs any number of services we could attain in Australia
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Thanks for your comments. Yes it's quite obvious thinking about it, that if we are told that other countries have network take-up and deployment advantages because of their high population densities then they would have hit these capacity issues long before us! It's definitely something we will take a look at for CommsDay and keep asking questions of the right people at network providers and carriers when we have a chance to. I totally agree with you John re tech finds a way. I'm now a regular visitor to the GSMA events and it's astonishing to see how much GSM/HSPA has spread across the world. There is more incentive to do the R&D and make it better than for FTTN in my view. Oh and apologies for my typos before, typing on an old laptop with the letters rubbed off the keyboard!
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How have HSPA sales gone on DAY ONE?
I would have thought that the majority of new HSPA users would be those wanting a modem, so it would be interesting to find out how many people are taking up the SIM only services.......... Comment (1)
There have been 18 aplications so far on the first 24 hour period.
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