John Linton
.......that wireless growth will hit at some time in Australia's future?
I read this:
hwittp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703876404575199744095734072.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews
with some interest this morning in the WSJ and was interested in some of the comments about the movement between the expected "giveaway the handset in exchange for a 24 month contract" that is the backbone of Australia's mobile telephone market. In the much tougher residential marketplace conditions being experienced in the USA perhaps the 'need' to have the latest gadgets only available by throwing away your perfectly good two year old mobile phone have finally become financially apparent. Then again maybe not. Whatever the real reason(s) turn out to be a 67% drop in new contract customer sales certainly indicates something massive is changing....at least for Verizon.
The US marketplaces have been offered really affordable data mobile capabilities for a very long time (over two years) while Australia (for all of the usual claimed reasons) still has no broadly affordable wireless data offerings from any of the three carriers with the possible exception of Vodafone/3. The US now has relatively inexpensive 'unlimited data' wireless services from multiple carriers and I suspect that Verizon' is perceived as lagging in such offerings there but it's hard to keep track of what offerings are actually being made from this distance.
I have no idea of the network capacities of the big US carriers but they were obviously big enough to cater for the huge growth in number of users on much more generous data plan costs than are currently available in Australia - and even more generous than the current offerings in the EU. Whether the moves to unlimited voice and unlimited data are causing pricing headaches for Verizon remains to be seen over the coming months. I will be interested to test out the capabilities of wireless networks in the UK in a couple of months and also check how/if prices have changed since I was there last. I occasionally do some on line checking to get a 'feel' for what is happening there but I would like to check first hand.
Growth of wireless usage in Australia continues to expand rapidly (as the last ABS figures demonstrated) and the ongoing investments in data capacity seems to be continuing in Australia. I have never encountered any problems with my personal wireless usage which is, I would have thought, fairly typical of a business user in total and possibly above average in terms of the hours a day/days per month of use. It will be interesting to see what the new rumblings about Telstra raising the cost of wire line prices by $A5.00 a month - will that be the 'last straw' that 'opens the flood gates' (to mangle two metaphors) and results in the mass abandonment of telephone wire lines at a much faster rate? If that happens you would expect to see a significant jump in wireless broadband usage I would have thought.
If you don't have a telephone line for ADSL there seems little point these days to pay an increased cost when you have a mobile telephone. If you can get a decent wireless broadband signal and don't need more than 3 - 4 gbytes of downloads you can now get a wireless plan at less cost than the possible rental of a wire line and get lower cost calls and not pay for ADSL. That scenario is truly compelling financially which is why I commented that the mooted PSTN line rental increase may be the 'last straw'.
If such an increase does come about and if the carriers, for a change, do continue to upgrade their wireless networks ahead of the increasing demand then the wire line may well 'die out' much sooner than expected. If that does happen - what a different communications land scape we would then see.
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
PS: The count down? Nothing spectacular. From tomorrow onwards if you are not an Exetel customer you will need to make a donation to Exetel's endangered wild life projects. Not worth it? Fine. Stop wasting your time reading my worthless ramblings. I have written 1,000 daily entries without missing a day over the past almost three years and if reading those random thoughts isn't of any value then - do yourself a favour..........
The past 1,000 entries have been written based on various agenda and have been, as "promised", overwhelmingly successful in meeting those agenda. I now have new agenda which, I believe, will best be served by making this minor change.