More Spectrum Needed As We Interoperate Worldwide
The Age
Saturday September 24, 2005
I STILL use a fixed-line phone at home and the office, but a lot of people don't these days - especially young people who often just use their mobiles when they move into a flat. But I have gone entirely mobile with my computer: I no longer own or use a desktop and I usually connect to the internet wirelessly - via a 3G mobile phone network card, which is how I filed today's column.
I noticed the other day that the price of laptop computers had fallen below $1000 for the first time and that global sales of them now exceed sales of desktops, so I'm obviously not alone in preferring mobility. In fact it's clear that the big switch from desktops to laptops is on, following the switch from fixed-line to mobile phones that is already transforming telecommunications. But what about connecting to the internet? 3G is slower and more expensive than ADSL, and Telstra and Optus are still backing the old blue ADSL cable plugged into the back of the machine. This week Optus announced, with much fanfare, that it's spending $150 million on the "largest threat to Telstra's dominance of the residential fixed-line market since competition was introduced", which is its roll-out of a national network of ADSL multiplexers that will take advantage of access to copper wires to pinch Telstra's customers. Which is all well and good, but if it's possible to break Telstra's dominance of the Australian residential market by spending $150 million, it won't be just Optus doing it that's for sure. And anyway, is ADSL really where the future lies? Not if that future involves laptops. In that case it's all about something called WiMax, which is officially due to get under way next month with formal certification in the US of standards for a new generation of wireless broadband equipment. There have been some delays with it already and there's a degree of scepticism about whether the industry can get its act together in time to actually launch commercial WiMax wireless broadband around the world in 2006, but the 320 companies that make up a group called the WiMax Forum, led by chip maker Intel, have been meeting in Los Angeles this week and there's a lot of confidence that it's really going to happen. Intel says it will have WiMax chips going into laptop computers in 2007, replacing or adding to the current Centrino wireless internet chips in most laptops. WiMax is the rather clever term for a new global standard of equipment that will operate high-speed wireless data transfer over relatively long distances. It's clever because it just sounds like a marketing company was asked to come up with something that sounds like a souped-up, "maximum" version of WiFi, which is the current name for the hotch-potch of hot-spot and wireless broadband services being rolled out around the world. In fact it's a technical acronym - worldwide interoperability for microwave access. Worldwide interoperability means just that: from next year, or perhaps the year after, we'll be able to take our laptops anywhere in Australia or the world, open them up and they will automatically connect to the internet via high-speed broadband. Microwave means spectrum between 2 gigahertz and 11GHz. One hertz is a unit of electromagnetic wave frequency equal to one cycle per second; giga is a thousand million of them.Information is carried on these waves by minute adjustments to both the amplitude (size) and frequency (length) of the waves, in the same way that AM (amplitude modulation) and FM (frequency modulation) radio works. The US Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) controls the standards for equipment that employs radio spectrum and has named the standards for these bands 802.16. WiMax works on 802.16e. In Australia a lot of this microwave spectrum is unlicensed and publicly available for such things as opening your garage door. A lot more of it is set aside for communicating with satellites and for aircraft radar systems. All of that is either useless for a wireless internet business because of interference, or off limits. In 2000, the Australian Communications Authority, as it was then, auctioned some 2.3 GHz, 2.5GHz and 3.4GHz spectrum for wireless broadband communication. The Department of Communications decided, in its infinite wisdom, to prevent Telstra from bidding so there would be some competition against its access monopoly. It was all bought by a new company called Unwired and the regional pay TV carrier, Austar. They have since done a spectrum swap and a keep-off-the-grass agreement that gives Unwired the cities and Austar the bush. It turns out that this spectrum is suitable for WiMax, although no one knew it at the time. Not only that, as things stand it is the only spectrum suitable for it in Australia, which means we seem to have the absurd situation that the main alternative to Telstra's monopoly is another monopoly - shared between Unwired and Austar. In fact, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, as it now is, plans to auction some more spectrum suitable for WiMax next year, and this time Telstra will be allowed to bid. All of which begs the two basic questions about internet access: speed and price. ADSL in Australia goes up to 1.5 million bits of data per second (megabits), but actually runs slower than that most of the time. WiMax can theoretically go up to 70 Mbps, according to Unwired, and is typically faster than ADSL. It's a question of what you need. Businesses might need the 100 Mbps that optic fibre delivers, but for most personal users WiMax would be plenty - until they want to watch Terminator 2 on the train. So it will come down to price, and therefore competition. More spectrum please ACMA. Alan Kohler also presents finance on ABC TV news and is the host of ABC TV's Inside Business. -- mail@alankohler.com
© 2005 The Age
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