John Linton ....well at least how far the Europeans have reached in the provision of fast HSPA.
I 'tidied up' as many of the 'loose ends' and outstanding tasks as I could yesterday and will complete two more later this morning and then head for the airport. I really need the break, as much as you can ever get a break these days with email, VPNs and Voip, and am looking forward to time in the remaining English and Scottish wildernesses and finding out more about bird protection and regeneration projects in those places - particularly the white tailed sea eagle, the golden eagle and the red kite (which we saw last time in Wales).
Inevitably there will also be the business related issues of obtaining and using HSPA services both via 'dongle' and via plugging a sim directly into the new notebook I bought for that purpose (plus the fact that lugging my 4 year old lap top around has been a pita or the past few years).
On previous trips to the UK over the last few years the number of hotels that had broadband was far less than I had expected once you left the major cities and big towns - that was mainly due to my desire to always stay in the country rather than the cities and often remote country areas. It's unreasonable to expect there to be broadband on the Scottish inner isles (let alone the outer islands or the Hebrides) and I found it mildly annoying not to be able to have internet connectivity to check my email and look at our data base reports to see how Exetel was doing in my absence.
Looking at the coverage maps for Three and Vodafone that is likely to still be a problem in many of the areas I'm planning to visit but the BT coverage looks significantly better. My theory is that if I bought a new light weight notebook I could get a very long battery life which would make it possible to leave the notebook on all day while driving and somewhere along the different routes we would eventually pick up a GSM signal (or whatever was available). That's the theory.
The other testing I want to do is to see just what sort of speeds I get in remote areas and, just as importantly, in densely populated areas (London and Manchester have popluation and business densities much larger than the Sydney or Melbourne inner cities). Everything I have read about the European's implementation of HSPA is that they have coped with their 'spectrum limitation issues' very well with no restraints on the numbers of users in any 'cell area' experiencing contention or speed problems. I'm looking forward to trying that out for myself and see how it compares with Steve's experiences of WiMAx in the USA (basically unusable in many densely populated areas last time he was in LA and Las Vegas for InterOp). Though maybe even a city as well serviced as Las Vegas has trouble coping with an influx of 100,000 engineers all try to rip off the local unprotected wireless networks.
Another business element of the trip is to meet with BT and find out what opportunities there may be for Exetel in the EU buying wholesale services from BT or other carriers. I did some preliminary investigations and got some 'generic' pricing which seemed just OK but I have an introduction to two of the key BT Wholesale people via an old acquaintance and I will try and meet with them while I'm, briefly, in London.
The last business component is to meet with one of the world's largest 'independent' providers of SMS services to see what we can obtain in terms of interconnect points around the world and pricing. Our SMS service continues to grow in popularity and it's an excelent 'foot in the door' service for Exetel's business services generally. While a service that costs between 3 cents (big business volumes) and 5 cents (one off residential user charge) is not going to make any big difference to Exetel's revenues (or profits) it's a very important service in many more ways than those I've referenced here. I doubt that we will ever be able to get the 'right deal' in Australia and it will be interesting to see what might be possible in the EU. (providing my French oral skills are up to the task!).
So it's "goodbye from me" - as I don't know when/if I'll be able to write here again.
For those people who have written to me so unkindly over that time - thank you - it's good to know I have retained the ability to 'seriously annoy' people like you - it gives me a great deal of pleasure to know that you are stupid enough to go out of your way to waste your time reading what I wrote and then waste even more of your time writing to me - you gave me a great deal of amusement.
For those of you who have sent me encouragement to write these musings over the past eleven and a half months - thank you very much - I really appreciated hearing from you and knowing that at least some people were getting something from sharing my thoughts on the vagaries of running a small comms business in Australia.