[LINK] Indonesia Overtaking Australia with Wireless Internet

Tom Koltai tomk at unwired.com.au
Fri Jun 3 13:27:57 AEST 2011



> Subject: [LINK] Indonesia Overtaking Australia with Wireless Internet
> 
> 
> Greetings from the famous room N101 at the at the Australian National 
> University, where Dr Idris Sulaiman is speaking on "ICT-enablement in 
> Environmental Social Movements in Indonesia": 
> <http://cecs.anu.edu.au/seminars/more/SID/2879>.
> 
> He is describing the social changes that the Internet and 
> social media 
> are having in Indonesia. Facebook's second largest number of 
> users are 
> in Indonesia (after the USA). The rapid increase in urban 
> Indonesia is 
> causing problems with traffic but also providing benefits. 
> There is an 
> increase in fixed line telephones, but what is most 
> interesting is the 
> rapid rise in mobile phone use, to the point where it now 
> exceeds that 
> of developed nations.
<SNIP>
> 
> This has significant implications for Australia, which has 
> invested $43B 
> in a nationalised fibre optic National Broadband Network. It 
> may be that 
> Indonesia's free market wireless approach turns out to have been the 
> better option. If most consumers and small businesses access the 
> Internet via a hand held wireless device, then the rationale 
> for the NBN 
> evaporates. However, as Dr Sulaiman  pointed out the wireless has 
> capacity limitations and in Indonesia (and Australia to a 
> lesser extent) 
>   latency and daily peak period cause problems. But these are 
> likely to 
> be acceptable for casual personal use but not for business.

At 17.2 Exabytes a month usage by 2014, I'm afraid the conclusion must
be incorrect.
There is not sufficient spectrum to deliver that bandwidth via LTE.
So for home usage, for the next ten years at least, the NBN is a
necessary adjunct unless Australia can find approximately an additional
950 MHz of Spectrum for the wireless Carriers.

However, even in that scenario, the Carriers will suffer seriously by
2013 from lack of ROI on new cell towers.
(On the assumption that each cell can only carry 6 Broadband users...
Down from GSM @ 992 per...)

TomK








 




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