John Linton .....a totally different,and nothing like as pleasant, experience from the beauty and peace of the English rural districts.
We returned our hire car and got a cab into our hotel which is situated just behind the Ritz in St James. Very pleasant hotel with impeccable service and we had a light lunch before I escorted Annette to her preferred shopping destination and then walked back to the hotel with the first of her 'parcels'. The weather, incredibly for England, still remains sunny and very warm - but the hotel room has modern air conditioning which is difficult to find here and impossible in the areas we have been visiting. When logging in to the hotel internet I noticed as well as the main wifi connection they had an option for a prioritised VoIP connection - never seen that before. We will go to our favorite London restaurant tonight and then Annette will do a shop till you drop day in Oxford Street tomorrow finishing up with theatre (All My Sons - David Suchet and a similar English cast) and dinner tomorrow night.
An interesting aspect of central London is that (having bought a new much faster modem out of curiosity) wireless broadband runs at almost 20 mbps on occasions and I'm told the networks will be delivering consistently above 20 mbps before Christmas. As I have no longer got any close contacts in the industry here I can't get the details of the infrastructures and versions now in use in the various areas/districts of the UK. Perhaps its just testing LTE on a wider scale than is planned for Australia by Telstra and Optus. Whatever it is - it's impressive. While I have never been inconvenienced by the wireless broadband speeds I have used in Australia or in the UK I understand that some percentage of a broadband user base finds fast download speeds important and simply buy a service on that criterion. I wonder what those user types will do if wireless becomes this fast in Australia? Complain about the latency?
Our hotel has a fibre connection (I suppose being in central London is like being in the CBD in Sydney or the CBD in Tokyo - you can get 100 mbps fibre links for very little cost) and I timed the hotel's link against the wireless broadband link - wireless was faster by about 5 mbps. While that doesn't mean anything , it's an example of what happens when multiple users log in to any service that has a fixed bandwidth - each user takes their share of a finite resource whether it's a direct fibre link to a building or a mobile carrier's tower servicing a geographic area. Either infrastructure will more than adequately serve whatever purposes are required by the overwhelming majority of end users.
Food for thought.
As my mind clears as the last of the gentle holiday days go past I have begun to think about how to deal with the change from ADSL to either fibre or wireless for the majority of residential users over the next 18 months. I have no idea of time frames or directions as the only real information is from our own data analysis (ie. what we can see in the adds/moves/deletes of our own customers) and what is publicly available in the US and EU media - the Australian media is not helpful in this respect as it seems to confine itself to today's 'sensation' rather than doing any sensible investigation of true future directions - which may well be because Australian companies are strangely reticent to talk honestly about their operations.
Having said that, I think that it will be difficult to predict the 'end of ADSL' for a while but you'd have to think that there is a great deal of work that has to be done to between now and xx/xx/xx to satisfy the economic imperatives of delivering/migrating residential data services via a new main medium/media? My view is that we will have to put that in place quite soon now.One of the things we have already started is supplying (for those who want it) a no monthly charge wireless connection with any new or re-contracted ADSL plan. While this is in its very early days I think it is something that's going to be quite important once/if Australian wireless broadband exceeds the speed of wire line broadband.
We will need to keep improving that offer (both to new customers and to current customers) over the coming months with the ultimate aim of providing both services at the same per gb pricing - when/if ever that becomes possible. It seems from what I have seen in the UK that that convergence is much closer now than it was a year ago - at least for the majority of current broadband users (sub 20 gb per month) and it is likely that the Australian carriers will follow the EU and US carriers in the not that distant future.
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