Spending future generations’ money, wireless broadband and standard infrastructure
Kevin Rudd has identified Australia’s Future Fund as the way to pay for a $4.7 billion election promise to deliver broadband to Australian people.
I’ve recently been using Telstra’s Next-G network (850MHz HSDPA) and it works brilliantly. I’m regularly in regional Australia near Grafton and getting 200kbps is way better than the 21kbps available via a standard modem. In the city areas, the network can deliver peak speads of 3.6Mbps, with upgrades during this year and next year to ramp it up even further.
Besides the fallacy of spending future generations’ money, wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in wireless broadband than Mr Rudd’s vision of a wired broadband to homes? Large proportions of our population move home, meaning regular disconnect / connect cycles. Having a laptop card or a small wireless modem is a much more feasible option.
Also, 3.6Mbps is is plenty to receive a streaming DVD quality video. Right now, how much more do we need? Something like Next-G is, to me, a much more sensible strategy. But Telstra has work to do on delivering more reasonable pricing – Next-G is super convenient, but very expensive.
The one aspect of his vision is a neutral network where all players get equal access. One of the things that has always annoyed me about Australia’s telecommunications infrastruture is that for a population of just over 20 million on a vast continent, we have to have 3 of everything. remember when Foxtel dug up your road for its cable, then Optus came along a month later. do you see all those mobile towers everywhere? I wonder how much sharing between the carriers actually goes on?
What if we only had one CATV network and one mobile network and all the carriers bought time? How much faster would it have been to reach large tracts of the population? How much easier would it be to upgrade the network if you only do it once? Imagine how much cheaper it could be since you only need to pay for one installation of the infrastructure.
We’re seeing some aggregation with Telstra and Hutchison sharing, as is Optus and Vodafone. But still…the Austalian Government should have installed the infrastructure and leased time to the carriers. Carriers would then focus on services and content.
Mr Rudd’s vision is down this path, but with wireless broadband working very well, let’s skip the old generation and get on with the new. What we should be doing is encouraging all the carriers to agree on a single wireless broadband standard and just build the right infrastructure once.
General, Technology | Craig Errey | 
March 26, 2007 10:58 am
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