John Linton
....and it always seemed to me (and I have been 'on the record' on this for over three years) that the future of 'nation wide broad band' always had to include rural and regional wireless.
So it 'gladdened my heart' to read this earlier this morning
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704486504575097870614616164.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews:
Now, my knowledge and experience is miniscule compared to the big US carriers that provided the information to the FCC on how to improve the deployment of broad band availability to the US population and I am, very definitely, not claiming any sort of ability to 'see the future' but simply reaching the obvious conclusions from the available data that wireless is the obvious solution to providing high speed broadband in rural areas. The article also, yet again, calls in to question the un-costed assumption by Krudd that a 'national' (which more and more obviously excludes rural Australia) broad band infrastructure will cost an estimated $A43 billion when the FCC thinks some $US25 billion will deliver high speed broadband to 100 million homes (not 'premises') by some yet to be agreed date but estimated as being 2020.
Of course, until the full report is available to be read it's impossible to determine what exactly is being proposed and how any federal funding will be used to support the current carriers own network build outs. I don't know where the estimate of 4% of US citizens in rural areas can't get high speed broadband comes from and that number alone represents around 50% of Australia's total population. Compared to the current reduction in the 'NBN2' scope "to connect up to 90% of Australian premises when it is complete". (10% of Australian premises leaves an awful lot of country Australia without the 'benefits' of 'NBN2' unless I am misunderstanding the meaning of that phrase......which is quite possible).
As someone who uses wireless internet everywhere but the office I am obviously 'biased' in my assessment of how useful wireless is compared to wire line internet. Exetel has a small, but continually growing, business wireless user base who provide all of their personnel (the largest of these has well over 100 people) with wireless internet only for their travel and home use and have canceled all of the land line connections they used to provide to many of those personnel. Similarly we have a small, but continually growing, 'stream' of our own long term low end ADSL users who buy an Exetel wireless service and subsequently cancel their ADSL service and usually their wire line telephone line too.
Despite all of the statements made by people with deeply vested interests internet needs are widely diverse in Australia, and I would think, all other countries across the globe. Without being in any way some sort of communications 'Luddite' or someone who hasn't been around the data transfer industry for very long (my first experience was using a 2400 baud terminal connected via telephone to an IBM mainframe in the late 1960s) I really don't see the need for 100% of Australians (excluding rural and much of regional Australia) to have a 100 mbps fibre link as the best solution to their internet needs. Without being able to second guess the future development of 'on line' applications I very much doubt that even 50% of the Australian population would be willing, and in many cases, able to pay for a 100 mbps fibre service no matter how much it is subsidised by the tax payers.
Such a view, which is not only held by some "ignorant has been" (nice of the person who described me in those terms recently not to use "never was" I suppose) like me, is clouded at the moment by the cost of wireless services in Australia and, to a lesser extent, by the deliverable speeds of today's wireless services. However today's costs are some 25% of what they were only two years ago and widespread deliverable speeds are approaching 8 times what they were two years ago - a 32 times service improvement over far less than 3 years. By all means quibble with those numbers but that is what I have achieved over that period and I am certain my experience is widely shared.
As a comparison, and only based on Exetel's buy prices, ADSL speeds have not increased at all over the past 3 years and costs of providing services have remained static - no 32x improvement for that technology which is understandable because it is reaching, if it hasn't already reached, the end of its useful life which is made more likely, at least in Australia, by the cost/profit structures of the two main ADSL infrastructure owners. So clearly fibre is a logical replacement of PSTN based residential internet services...assuming an end user can afford it and has a future need for it. Telstra and Optus (and their part owned Foxtel) have been providing fibre services to residential users for more than a decade (closer to 15 years I think) and both Telstra and Optus continue to build out their fibre networks in Sydney and Melbourne currently. Nothing new about providing fibre to hundreds of thousands (over a million?) of capital city dwellers and the costs of doing that are obviously well known to at least three large Australian providers of data, telephone and entertainment services. But those suppliers have never given any indication that it is financially feasible to build a fibre infrastructure outside capital cities and most reasonable people would have to assume they would have a sound basis for making that judgment.
However there's no point in being right (assuming I am) when decisions are made based on totally different criteria.
PS: Telstra's future continues to be damaged by the proposed legislation currently in limbo in the Senate:
http://www.smh.com.au/business/broker-downgrade-wont-bode-well-for-telstra-20100303-pj79.html