John Linton ........but perhaps only very large companies will benefit from these trends.
I have always liked the obvious pluses of wireless broadband from the moment it solved my issues in finding a suitable hotel in the wilds of the UK that had a usable internet service some five years ago. In 'those days' the connection in rural England and the wilds of Scotland and Wales was nothing like as good as it is today but you could always get some sort of signal somewhere along the road or in a town which was stable enough for long enough to receive and send mail and do the other look ups that running a small business while you were on holidays required.
In the succeeding five years wireless broadband has dramatically improved in coverage, speed and lower pricing in the UK and has done similarly in Australia although it tends to have a 12 to 18 month lag in this country. In the UK when we were there in June of this year the common price point was 12 pounds (pre-paid) for 5 gb and the average speed was around 10 mbps in the rural areas where we spent most of our time. In broad terms it was about 60% of the price and twice as fast as a commonly available service in Australia with wider coverage. I also noticed that, in central London (where you would expect to find the highest contention being a city of some 8 million people in a densely packed area) I could detect no contention whatsoever although the frequency usage must have been massive. (I have always been surprised at the idiots in Australia who maunder on about how "wireless broadband will never have enough spectrum" - how much spectrum do they think is used in cities like Los Angeles, New York and London?).
Even a casual reading of the US technology media will 'tell the same story' as does the English language German and Scandinavian media. Only the Australian communications media doesn't report on the developments in wireless broadband in the same positive ways - all you see are articles and opinions that "wireless will never replace wire line broadband" despite the evidence to the contrary in simple statistics like Telstra's reports on the growing number of residences that don't have any sort of telephone line moving above the ten per cent level and increasing at a rate of 2 - 3% a year......among many other indicators.
Personally, I don't give the metaphorical 'plugged nickel' about Krudd's insanity of attempting to ruin the Australian communications industry by spending an absurd amount of borrowed money attempting to build something no-one needs and certainly that Australia cannot afford. However it will never exist in my life time so I will never know whether I am right in my view of such crass stupidity. For a while I was, mildly, concerned that a political cover up, apart from further bankrupting the country I have chosen to live in, would slow down the deployment of wireless broadband but, if anything it has actually increased the roll outs by both Telstra and Optus and significant increases in both average speed and stability of signal.
http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/networking/41496-telstras-42mbps-next-g-broadband-goes-live
While the unthinking and just plain stupid are 'excited' about the concept of Australia wide 1 gbps fibre connections (pretty much along the same lines as the stone age cargo cult dwellers in the jungles of New Guinea are excited about the next 'goods drop' from the strange coloured bird) there is an overwhelming and completely forgotten problem that is either unknown or ignored by the games players and thieves who download terabytes of illegal movies and TV shows. That is the 'aging' of Australia's population. People of 'mature age', or more sensibly, people of mature outlook don't actually steal other people's property nor do they play on line computer games or get a surrogate sex life from pornography. These sorts of people don't have any interest in terabyte broadband plans and speeds that can never make any difference to the applications they use. They certainly, for the most part, don't have large disposable incomes that they will be willing to allocate to expensive 'side shows' of their lives like broadband at $60.00 plus per month.
However another key thing these 'aging Australians' don't have is 'children' living at home whom they once indulged by paying for internet services that they do not need themselves and given a choice would stop doing that. They are going to be the ever growing percentage of Australians who are going to drive the percentage of residences that don't have any sort of wire line connection to their home. Not just for the cost saving but for the convenience of location within their home where they make and receive telephone calls and use the internet for the purposes they need and like.
My point, made more badly than I had hoped for, is that the actual market for wire line residential broadband is going to fall rather than increase. While I understand that no real analysis and certainly no credible costing has been done on Krudd's madness the simple fact is that the available market for wire line based broadband services in the future continues to be impossible to estimate. Perhaps someone with more than one brain cell in the Australian communications media will begin to actually report on the future of communications in Australia without sounding like a Sussex Street spin spiv?
That simple soul could start by doing a sensible analysis of why there is a growing number of residences that don't have any form of wire line connection?
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