John Linton I haven't had a chance recently to assess what is happening in the EU regarding wireless broadband actual experiences. My long term ex-colleagues who used to keep me up to date have both left the industry and, last time I heard from them, are both enjoying their retirement courtesy of long time employment with their final employer. Because of Catherine's unknown departure to her new job with IBM in the UK our usual end of financial year vacation has been canceled so I won't have the opportunity of doing my own testing and therefore I am having to rely on the public record for information which is never going to give any real operational information. It's only important because of the changes that will happen in Australia this coming year.
Over the next twelve months Telstra's LTE upgrades will continue and both Optus and VHA will 'turn on' their own versions of this much faster mobile technology. Based on my simple download 'side by side tests' I haven't seen any speed improvement in the test Telstra service I use to do a rough estimate of what happens in the 'real world' over time as the different carriers upgrade their wireless networks. If anyone has their own tests we would be happy to add you to the list of people with multiple providers who do 'real world' testing from different locations around Australia. The tests we run are simple - two downloads from known 'good' sites of your choice and five web page time to display the usable page also from sites of your choice.
My personal experiences in both Australia and the UK are that speed improves year on year and the growth in mobile broadband usage doesn't seem to impact these improvements. When I am in central London, which I assume is the densest usage of mobile broadband in that country (both by the huge number of tourists streaming their shots of themselves in land mark places 'back home' and the huge number of business users), I have never had a problem with my 'business' usage in either speed or drop outs. I have also noticed the progressive increase of coverage across rural England and apart from the middle of the Peak District or very remote areas of Northern Scotland I seem to get a usable signal almost everywhere - and we spend time in very remote places.
The remaining part of next year's business plan is to determine what we can do in terms of offering wireless mobile. We have not made much progress in this area of our business and it really is very important for us in the future. Whatever we have done over the past three plus years has not been effective and it's not going to be easy to find ways of improving our performance over the coming year - having come up with no ideas so far. One odd thing about our current wireless users is that a large percentage do not use any other Exetel service. Over the next few days we are going to have to come up with better ideas than we have in the past. The real need to do this is because of the increasing usage of wireless versus wire line in almost every market sector (the exceptions being games players and illegal down loaders).
So, the start of another demanding week.
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