John Linton
.......and what it may mean for Exetel in Australia.
I am still in deeply rural areas of the SW UK (mostly in Dartmoor and Exmoor over the past few days and both my Vodafone and TMobile service are able to keep me connected to the Exetel Databases and my email as well as allowing me to write this blog often from quite surprising places (like the top of Hound Tor where we were greeted with the sound of a mobile phone ringing which belonged to someone who had reached the peak just before we did). So it is pretty easy to use HSPA in an increasing number of out of the way places in the absolute middle of nowhere. (I regretted not having my notebook with me so I could have got Annette to take a picture of me using the internet on the top of the ragged rocks of Hound Tor with the emptiness to the horizon of anything but windswept moor land and put it on the Exetel Country Broadband web site to see if Telstra would complain it was an impossible place to use the internet!).
http://www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk/hound_tor.htm
As far as I can see it is possible to use HSPA for my purposes - connecting to the Australian databases, sending and receiving emails, general browsing and watching streaming video pretty much anywhere there is a small town or a reasonable road that isn't in a heavily wooded valley - even in the middle of a moor on top of a pile of rocks with nothing in sight from horizon to horizon other than bracken and heather and the occasional sheep or cow or wild pony. I received some market information that 25% of the people in the UK who have a wire line broadband service now also have an HSPA service and that 2/3 of all mobile plans now sold in the UK have data capability. Altogether there are an estimated 18 million HSPA services being used in the UK today which bill over 5 pounds per month.
One of the reasons I am disappointed about the opportunity for opening an HSPA operation in the UK is that it removes one major opportunity for buying HSPA modems at a reasonable price rather that the extraordinarily high price Optus charges us for them. The high cost of the modem in Australia is, in my opinion, holding back the sale of HSPA services. I haven't seen the latest ABS broad band survey figures but there seems little doubt that HSPA will have grown substantially overall, and in comparison to wire line broad band, over the past 6 and 12 months. Perhaps, however fast growth of HSPA in Australia turns out to be it would have been even faster if the impediments that exist in Australia had been eliminated. For instance the latest UK ad from '3' shows these details:
http://threestore.three.co.uk/broadband/modem.aspx?tariffid=1260
that the sale price for a 3.6 mbps HSPA USB modem is now $A20.00 retail purchase compared with the around $A150.00 in Australia (sure you can get a 'free' modem on a 24 month or so contract but that is not a really good idea). Also you would notice that the cost of a 5gb plan is now $A30.00 from '3' compared to around $A40.00 in Australia with this low cost modem offer and there is NO contract period other than the initial month. Both hardware prices and per gb prices in the UK are far better than anyone currently offers in Australia and I can see why the take up is far more rapid than in Australia. Also the utilisation of the data capabilities on 'pure' mobile services is increasing rapidly and is predicted to account for a higher percentage of mobile telephone revenue than voice calls by mid 2010.
Our progress in developing a sensible HSPA approach in Australia is still not developing as quickly as we need it to be and I was getting frustrated with our inabilities to make more rapid progress just before I left Australia. I am more relaxed after ten days of holiday in one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen but each time I look at the figures when I wake up in the morning I get annoyed that things aren't moving faster. We obviously need some better ideas and some lower cost hardware. We still have made no progress on finding a 'magic box' at a realistic price but have at least identified that such a box is now being commercially made but at far too high a price for it to be 'mass marketed' - it's still a 'specialist's' device. I will use my contacts to see if we can source 5 - 10,000 low cost Huawei sticks when I go to London which might help a bit but it isn't the real answer.
So - we need a breakthrough - and we need it before the end of October so we can make the most of the Christmas 'present' season in some sort of meaningful way. I have no idea how to bring this about but as I get more and more 'relaxed' my creative abilities seem to be gradually replenishing themselves from their state of exhaustion and a few more idyllic days may restore enough energy to get to grips with the issue in a sensible way. There has to be a realistic way of promoting the use of an HSPA service to replace a dial up or satellite service that doesn't require chicanery - or so I would have thought.