John Linton We left the dales behind us this morning and headed for the M1. I am a great admirer of both the topology and surfaces of the English motorway system that can get you from practically any part of the country to any other part of the country at breath taking speeds....until there's a problem. Anyway we had an uneventful few miles from our hotel to the our joining point to the M1 just outside Chesterfield and once on the motorway quickly settled down in the outside lane driving at between 80 mph up to over 90 mph most of the 120 miles to the M25 junction where we ground to a, literal, halt on the slip road to the M25. As is the usual experience on that dreaded piece of road we ambled along at 5 - 10 mph between frequent periods of motionlessness for about 30 minutes (in which time we traveled less than one and a half miles) before resuming our journey at a more sedate 60 - 70 mph all the way to the exit the other side of Heathrow where our hotel for the next two nights was located.
The trip took just over 3 hours to travel 156 miles....a pretty reasonable travel time anywhere in the world but to do that required quite a bit of 'white knuckle' driving as the users of English motorways seem to have different distance judgment scale than I do and also assume that you should get out of their way (even when you are doing 90 mph and there is a series of vehicles directly in front of you all doing 95 mph) even if the lane you need to move into is crammed with other vehicles - which it quite often is on the section of the M1 we used. So we were grateful to arrive at our destination in one piece and after checking in having a refreshing ice cold drink on their attractive lawn overlooking their moat.
While Annette watched the Wimbledon men's semi finals I scanned the Australian media and looked for inspiration in the US, UK and German comms media. I didn't find any which is probably because I have now been away for 10 days and my mind has lost its focus on Exetel events and issues as was the purpose of the holiday. One thing I did find of some interest was the UK pricing for lower end wireless broadband services in the 3 - 5 gb (down/up) range which covers a very large percentage of broadband users in Australia. Most of the offers I could find were in the 15 to 20 pound range which is 5 to 7 Big Macs in terms of price points or well below $A30.00. I can't estimate an 'average' speed with any meaning but the lowest I have got on this trip is 1.6 mbps (wilds of rurality) and the fastest currently (bearing in mind I have never used the service in a big city or even very close to one) is a little over 13 mbps down and close to 3 mbps up.
As I wrote a few weeks ago; the US carriers seem to have decided that 2 gbps for around $US25 is the key market point for mobile data over telephone handsets so it would make sense for a PC type service to have the 3 - 5 gb and at the same price point as 2 gb for a mobile service it is very attractive. What it seems to indicate is that as the volumes of data via wireless networks continues to rapidly grow the price er gb continues to fall....but...apparently faster than estimated if the price movement in the UK between this time last year and today is real. Now that Telstra has to 're-cast' its longer term strategy for residential services (Holland just beat Brazil!!) to find a way of going forward and it would be even more blindingly obvious now that wireless is the way to go as a competitor to fibre.
If the prices I am currently seeing in the UK are real then Telstra (and Optus) would be tracking the same cost reduction curve. Neither company has any incentive to continue to invest in ADSL. Neither company has any incentive to invest in fibre. Both companies have significant capital works investment money committed in Australia - I guess it will all/mostly go to wireless infrastructure. If that is the case then the competition between fibre and wireless outside the capital cities will become almost a foregone conclusion - at least in my view of how data communications technologies have evolved and died over the last thirty years.
Only time will tell but it remains an interesting business to be in - as it always has.
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