John Linton We continue to see a continuing increase in the number of Exetel/Optus HSPA customers who are reporting faster than expected speeds on their HSPA service - which is very encouraging following the spiteful deluge of exaggerated negativity from the persistently anti-Optus 'plants' in the Australian technology press a few months ago. My personal experience, and the experiences of all of the users I know personally, is uniformly good and recent reports show that Optus announced program of constant and rapid network upgrades is delivering results in an increasing number of areas that far exceeds the conservative 'cautions' we publish on our web site. Many of the customers that report back with the speeds they are achieving say how happy they are with getting speeds at least double those we set out as being likely on the web site.
One very surprising result of the Optus' HSPA upgrade program that I was shown yesterday was a download speed of over 4.5 mbps and an upload speed of over 1 mbps using a Cisco 881 (dual Ethernet/HSPA) router testing from our North Sydney office. We were doing this to provide an auto fail over back up circuit for our SHDSL/Ethernet business customers who currently need 'instant' back up in the case their main circuit fails. We were testing it on our own office circuits (we currently have three major connections from our office to our two Sydney PoPs which we want to reduce to two).
Optus confirmed that they were now upgrading their HSPA network to 7.2 mbps (down) and while our contact didn't have a roll out map it was obvious that the North Sydney area was one of the areas that had already been done. Prior to that we had been able to consistently get in excess of 2.5 mbps. These speeds make it a 'no brainer' to implement a $5.00 a month back up high speed back up circuit replacing two 2mbps/2mbps circuits whose commercial cost is over $A400 a month each.
So the higher speeds are good for business users for this particular application for who would be almost irresponsible not to implement such a cost/effective redundancy process. Such a solution would also be of interest to 'home users/small business users who use broadband for 'up time critical' applications from their homes. A great step forward for such users.
As the cost of the dual Ethernet/HSPA hardware falls (the Cisco 881 is currently over $A1,000) I would be pretty sure that more of the 'serious' home users will use this back up option as they can also use it in their lap top when they 'travel'. Of course, as the cost of HSPA data falls the need for a wire line broadband service will continue to decline for a wide range of Australian broadband users.
It also is very heartening to see that the current Optus network (and presumably all other carrier's HSPA networks) are tracking quite closely to the original predictions that came out of Europe some three years ago now that 10 mbps+ would be in place by late 2008 moving to 40 mbps+ by late 2009 with 100 mbps (LTE) services available by the end of 2010). Looking at this article:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/240672/mobile-broadband-to-hit-42mbsec-in-2009.html
it seems to be still a realistic expectation, at least in Europe, and there is no reason why similar speeds/time frames shouldn't be achieved in Australia.
It's still very early days of course and there remain many unknowns but I am pretty happy that the almost three years long, arduous and constantly disappointing slog to put in place a viable HSPA service for Exetel's Australian customers has got off to a relatively positive start and, in some respects, is performing better than we had expected. Of course, cost is still a major issue but if we can't either address that issue (or Optus addresses that issue on our behalf) then there are now more options than there used to be. We still have the option of providing HSPA services in the UK (and other parts of the EU) and that would, if it were to be successful, provide us with an economy of scale in both hard ware purchase and transit data than we could ever do in Australia alone.
On balance I'm still of the opinion that it was better, for Exetel, to pursue (even when it looked hopeless) an HSPA future solution than accept the easier path of installing DSLAMs and remaining bound to a copper wire solution. Though it would have been cheaper to go the DSLAM path I still think it was a short term solution with no future benefits - though now the interest rates have fallen the revised DSLAM build offers have become even more attractive - if they go any lower we would be able to put in 250 DSLAMs at no capital cost and delayed payment terms beyond this decade! We have recently been offered capital prices at less than 50% of what we were considering in January of this year and 'finance terms' that require no payment for 24 months. Hard to resist such offers from a purely financial view point.
It is an exciting prospect to see how far and how fast HSPA will develop in Australia over the next 12 months - 24 mbps in most of Australia by Christmas 2009?
Who needs an NBN delivering 12 mbps to a bit of Australia by Christmas 2012?