The industry backed LTE 4G standard is poised to be a great contender to the existing WiMAX technology. While a few countries have already started rolling out LTE networks, and many more are in the starting blocks, Australia have decided to not follow this development.
The Australian government commissioned “National Broadband Network Implementation study”, which assessed the government’s plans for investment in a publically funded and operated broadband network, was released 2 weeks ago. The study’s findings include a recommendation to extend the network’s proposed coverage and revised cost estimations. The study also recommends that 4G wireless technologies such as LTE and WiMAX are unlikely to be integrated in the network as they lack “the capacity, range and bandwidth sufficient to serve the Government’s mandated speeds to regional Australian premises”.
The National Broadband Network is an Australian Government project initially proposed during the 2007 election campaign and officially announced in April last year. It is set to be the largest single infrastructure investment in Australia’s history and is expected to cost around 43 billion AUD (30 billion EUR), although the Implementation study suggests that this is a conservatively high estimate. The projects goal is to supply 90% of the population with broadband capable of 100 Mbit/s and the remaining 10%, predominately living in remote locations, with next generation wireless and satellite technologies capable of up to 12 Mbit/s.
The CEO of NBN Co Limited – the Government Business Enterprise that is designing, building and will operate the network, Mike Quigley stated that he believed that wireless mobile technologies such as LTE and WiMAX are “absolutely going to be a part of the fabric of telecoms in the future“, however he supports the Implementation Study’s recommendation that “In the least densely populated parts of Australia, the only economically-feasible way to deliver broadband is via satellite“. The Study found that to provide the speeds required by the project, the LTE or WiMAX towers would need to be within a seven kilometers radius of users.
Australia has a small population of only 22 million spread over a vast area, basically the equivalent of the population of the Greater Metropolitan area of New York spread across a country of comparable size to the continental US. Although having one of the highest urbanized populations with around 90% of the population living in the main metropolitan centers (3rd highest in OECD), the remaining 10% are spread considerably thin across the continent. As well as high costs, the result is average internet speeds well below the standards set in Western Europe, North America and the advance economies of East Asia. These are issues that the infrastructure project hopes to remedy.
On the one hand, the claims of the Government’s NBN Implementation Study seem reasonable with respect to the costs involved with supply remote communities with next generation wireless infrastructure. However, on the other hand, it seems strange to abandon these future technologies at this stage in the game, especially as LTE networks have already been launched in Sweden and Norway, and are expected by the end of the year in the US and Japan (more on this here).
Not embracing the LTE standard and instead focusing on older technologies 100 Mbit/s, Australia may continue to lag behind in internet quality surely at the detriment of domestic users.
