John Linton As a long term proponent of wireless mobile I keep reasonable records of the performance of our own HSPA service (via Optus Layer 2 - not the Optus Layer 3 version) and have done that for four years as of today - since I was given the first 'trial' dongle. For almost three years now I have also kept records for a Telstra mobile data service for simplistic comparison purposes - my ability to 'test' either service being restricted to where I live and work and a few over night excursions to NSW and Victorian country towns. For those who can be bothered to remember quite a lot has happened over four years and today's mobile broadband experience is quite different to those early days of indifferent signal strength and coverage.
As someone old enough to remember what Telstra's and Optus' mobile telephone coverage was like in 1991 and how that has developed over the past two decades I have not been at all surprised at how mobile broadband coverage and abilities have developed over the past four years. I have been least surprised by the cost of using a mobile broadband service over that period - while the average speed on my Optus service has quadrupled the cost of the service has fallen by 80% - if you like - the cost/speed performance of a wireless data service has improved twenty fold in three years. The speed improvement on the Telstra wireless broadband service has improved more than five times (using a borrowed 4G sim from an acquaintance) but the fall in cost has not been as dramatic as that of the Optus service.
I pointed out four years ago that the concept of an 'NBN2' (or as it was then in Krudd's lies to the electorate an 'NBN1') for regional areas of Australia was a pointless waste of tax payer money as the commercial mobile companies would be providing mobile data services to those areas at no cost to the tax payer and at a lower cost to the end user long before the government would make those services available. I also made the point that the planned development of GSM through LTE and beyond would continue to provide speeds that would exceed those of ADSL before December 2011 and would then proceed along the pre-defined path to speeds beyond those delivered via fibre and at a fraction of the cost to either the provider or the end user.
So what do we see four years down the track from Krudd's lies? Less than 1,000 end users have an 'NBN2' fibre connection while far more than a million end users have a wireless broadband connection that rivals the speed of a typical ADSL speed connection at half the price of ADSL. Telstra has already begun live testing of LTE speeds in capital cities and Optus
is saying they will begin making LTE speeds available by the end of 2011.
They are the facts. Four years ago the lying Krudd and then the stupid Steven (a 'parrot' of the most mundane) made all sorts of statements about the unsuitability of wireless for regional Australia and those lies and stupidities can now be seen, by even the naivest and technologically illiterate person as being as untrue and stupid as when I first commented on them in September 2007. Everything that was then published about GSM development over the past twenty years has been put in place exactly as it was planned - on time and at the predicted pricing. There seems to be no reason to doubt that everything now planned to come about over the next ten years for wireless broadband will happen in exactly the same planned time frames and predicted costs as the previous twenty years. Why would it be any different when every country on the planet is making it happen?
Wireless broadband, as "predicted" over four years ago will continue to meet more and more current ADSL user's needs as each month passes. The fact it doesn't need a 'telephone line' to make it work also means the price advantage of wireless over ADSL will continue to widen. The soon to be released ABS figures will demonstrate the facts of this situation more clearly than I am able to do in a personal blog...so that will have to wait until September 18th.
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