John Linton
........as a hawk's shadow is to a field mouse caught in the middle of a school playground.
I was thinking about the ACMA numbers I cited yesterday in this article:
http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_312017
and considered what the ABS figures would show for the period ended 31/12/09 when they get around to producing them (as far as I know they haven't yet asked for the data for that six month period yet - but I could be wrong). The ACMA data is already six months old and is only the ABS data published in a slightly different form so is not helpful in adding to the knowledge of the wireless and other markets. As far as I can tell from various public comments by Telstra and 'private' comments by Optus and Vodafone their wireless take up was much faster over the last six months of 2009 than the 162% reported by ACMA for the previous twelve months with Telstra saying it now had over 2 million wireless connections and the vaguer comments by the other two carriers indicating that the total of wireless connections must be approaching 3 million which, if true, is an extraordinary technology take up rate - by far the fastest Australia has ever seen. Exetel's wireless broadband sales are running at around 300% of what they were in January 2009 but that is from a very small base so is no of any significance to 'trends'.
Wireless broadband for me is like VoIP - I don't even consider what I am using when I use my notebook just as I don't give a second thought to the fact that my calls to and from Exetel's offices in North Sydney and Colombo, to and from my mobile and to and from my home are all VoIP. It's just technology that I use to do my work and provides information about whatever I need at any time. I don't think the speed I get (around 1.5 mbps) or the cost of $20 or so dollars a month is any sort of issue for my business and personal use and I think that view is held by a larger and larger percentage of broadband users.....at least the information published seems to indicate that's the case. Which leads me to wonder how typical, or untypical, I am in terms of internet use. As an Exetel user I am definitely in the lower 50% of down loaders who don't down load video content from the web and don't play on line games. But I am, as are the other 50% of Exetel's users, a person whose internet uses aren't going to change dramatically over the next few years - I will remain a mainly business user with some leisure use all of which is non-video and not even audio.
I suspect that apart from teenagers (whose internet is paid for by their parents) and 10% - 20% or so of the adult population most internet users neither need higher speeds than wireless does and will deliver nor do they need more downloads than are and will be affordable. They will buy at a price point that suits their individual life circumstances with the continuing major consideration being 'affordable cost' (whatever that means in each individual's then current circumstances). If these suppositions are anything like correct then it's going to be a pretty hard sell for ANY broadband service over $50.00 a month because wireless is already demonstrating that unless you need high downloads then the widening gap between the cost of wireless and the cost of wire line broadband services is beginning to become more and more apparent.
The NBN2 was dreamed up by a total wanker (Krudd) who had and has less than zero knowledge about telecommunications based on summary/key point 'briefing papers' done on the fly by pretty average civil servants. 'Listening' to the frantic rationalisations since the announcement that "no Australian working family will live without 100 mbps internet by the next date I come up with" it has become apparent that the people trying to justify the need for an NBN2 (at any cost let alone at an affordable one) are fumbling in denial that mobile telephony (will remove the need for any sort of telephone service other than mobile for the overwhelming majority of users) and that wireless internet will meet the needs of some very large percentage of current ADSL users leaving the 'market' for a super fast service with a much less number of likely subscribers than even the most pessimistic of real people would have estimated.
There's no point in maundering on about needs for high speed medical services and the like - they can be, and already have been, delivered by commercial fibre. No point in saying 'cost/benefit' of a combined residential data/telephony service - a rapidly growing number of people no longer use a fixed connection for their telephone calls and won't go back to one. No point in trying to say that on demand video will become universal - it already is and the studios, and Rupert Murdoch determine who delivers their content not a moon faced moron in the far away Southern Oceans trying to get himself re-elected to an insignificant sinecure in an insignificant country.
Krudd is playing the Kevin Costner part in his very own version of Field Of Dreams (build an NBN2 and they will come!!!). I think his problem is that he's mistaking that stream of lights coming up Parliament Hill as headlights of cars bearing punters coming to fill the bleachers rather than the torches of the peasants from quite another movie coming to burn him and his pretentious posturing to death.
The current apparent plateauing of ADSL, or even its decline, is an indication clearer than any Krudd nonsense that the new primary driver for data is mobility not download speed or download allowance - at least it is for a growing number of internet users who will be unlikely to ever consider an NBN2.