John Linton It's very quiet in the international media concerning telecommunications companies and issues. Basically, apart from the spat between AT&T and The FCC regarding the proposed takeover of T-Mobile there appears to be nothing happening. Similarly, the Australian telecommunications media is eerily quiet apart from the massive over reporting about non events connected in some way with the 'NBN2'. Nothing on real news of either companies or technologies which I find that situation to be strange as in the US, the EU and in Australia the introduction of more and more LTE services would have been quite 'news worthy' I would have thought. But then I clearly view things differently to Australian media writers.
I only raise this issue because of the possibilities of Telstra 'wholesaling' its LTE mobile services in the first half of 2012 either as mobile telephony with high speed data tethering or as a standalone mobile data service. I have no specific knowledge of whether or not this may happen - only the obfuscatory words of various Telstra 'spokes people' and I lack the Byzantine mental processes that could make any sense of those - but the implications appeared to be that it might be a possibility at some future time. Given the various pricing scenarios that are always part of Telstra's 'wholesale' offerings it is unlikely to be a very attractive possibility - at least initially - to a company of Exetel's size but it is something to be considered as neither Optus nor Vodafone seem to have any hope of catching up with Telstra in this product category any time in the foreseeable future - and certainly not in the areas that we are mainly interesting in providing such services.
Exetel's progress in providing mobile broadband services has been a continuing disappointment to me since we established our interest in this technology more than five years ago. We have made almost no progress in establishing a viable mobile broadband offering that is widely accepted although the business users who like our back end management processes are all remarkably 'loyal' with almost none moving to other providers once they sign up and use our add on services. So the years have passed and nothing much has changed in the larger business markets - but we tend to believe that there is now an opportunity in small business usage that could be a genuine option to provide wireless broadband as a real back up to an ADSL or fibre small business service. Currently a 'tethered' mobile handset can provide a measure of back up for a small business ADSL service that loses connectivity and will therefore take 24 to 72 hours (possibly more) to restore. However it would be better to provide an 'auto fail over' MBB solution for all the obvious reasons.
So, as we have played around with a new small business offering, with some sort of 'magic box' and an affordable stand by wireless broadband capability, we are much closer to delivering such a service than we have ever been in the past.....not quite there yet....but so much closer than at any previous time. We continue to work on a 'final solution' that includes ADSL/Fibre with wireless broadband back up and affordable business VoIP that is supported via unlimited telephone engineering advice and guidance.....plus on site help at a charge if that is required for more complex services. With a bit of luck and some better buying on our part we may almost be there - with the one remaining 'obstacle' being what speed mbb back up service is required to make this solution really practical? The best combination is fast fibre plus LTE - however that is not on any immediate horizon. If either/both become available then 2012 could be the year of mobile broadband - even though it will mainly be used statically.
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