[LINK] Wireless Broadband for Regional Australia

Paul Brooks pbrooks-link at layer10.com.au
Mon Dec 23 10:39:25 AEDT 2013


On 21/12/2013 8:53 AM, Tom Worthington wrote:
> On 20/12/13 13:27, Paul Brooks wrote:
>
>> ... the initial assumption (most people are accessing their broadband
>> via WiFi and Mobile Broadband) is an incorrect starting point. ...
> The ABS reported that at the end of June 2013 mobile wireless broadband
> was the most prevalent internet technology in Australia. It is just
> under half all the broadband connections in Australia:
> http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/D6B00147BF1749E1CA257BFA00127708?opendocument


Numbers of accounts is not a credible proxy for usage or utility.
Mobile wireless broadband stats are misleading and, IMHO, worthless as comparisons
with other forms - they are only valid for comparing with past and future wireless
broadband stats to look at growth trends within the series.
Mobile wireless broadband stats are counting USB dongles, pocket cellular/Wifi
routers, and dedicated data-only SIMs. By their nature, they are per-person or
per-device (a household with two 3G-enabled tablets will have two SIMs and be counted
as 2 in the stats), while other forms of broadband are per-household (very few
households have two forms of fixed/satellite broadband) and could have tens of devices
served through the same channel.

Also, it is not either/or - a household with cabled broadband could well also be
represented by several mobile wireless counts as well. My own house would be counted
as 1 cabled broadband and 3 wireless broadband in the stats - but the 1 cabled link
gets used far more, and relied on far more, than the mobile broadband SIMs which get
fired up on odd occasions while travelling.

It is not valid to intercompare the mobile broadband and fixed broadband stats in a
meaningful way. Newspapers and politicians do it, but I expect better in here.

>
> I couldn't find any figures for WiFi use at home, but my observations of
> ICT in the home is that WiFi is used much more than wired connections.
Huh? Its not either/or - WiFi is used as a last-few-metres method to connect devices
to wired connections. Unless you were deliberately switching your use of the word
'wired connection' from a fixed-line broadband connection to referring instead to a
hard-wired Ethernet cable linking  a device to the home network, in which case I would
observe that 'used more' is ambiguous, and repeat that number of links is not a
credible proxy for usage or utility. My observations of ICT in the home is that all
but the simplest homes have a mixture of hard-cabled and WiFi devices using their
broadband network, and while there is usually a greater number of WiFi devices, the
volume of traffic and performance issues lean to the cabled devices. Yes, most people
are happy with wireless for web-browsing and email, but quickly use a cable for high
bandwidth uses such as home NAS or video streaming, and when the WiFi isn't quick
enough to do what they want to do or doesn't reach the back corners of the residence.

>
>> At home, people don't 'access broadband', they use broadband to
>> 'access devices/servers/content' ...
> Provided the cost is not significantly higher, I can't see why people
> would want to access different devices, servers and content at home, to
> the ones they use when out and about.

>> ... its the same sloppy thinking that conflates "broadband" with "the
>> Internet"...
> Do homes have many broadband interconnected devices? Home NAS servers
> don't sound like common consumer items. I assume that most people would
> be using broadband to connect to on-line storage and services outside
> the home, via the Internet, thus making "broadband" and "Internet"
> synonymous.
Not if they have a low-quota broadband service, or a low-speed broadband service.
The last 10 years of OS development has been in getting devices in the home
interconnected. Shared drives and printers, ethernet-connected printers, 'Homegroup'
in Windows and the equivalent in other OSs, all aimed at allowing family members on
one computer to access content or devices actually located on a different computer.
Home NAS devices are now the preferred way to offload large photo collections than
USB-connected external drives, and many home broadband routers can advertise a USB
external drive attached to the router as a network-available storage NAS drive.
Are you telling me you have never 'shared' a printer connected to one computer so the
other devices in your home could print to it?
You've never shared a drive so you can access the files from another computer in your
house?

Sure you can use an external cloud provider for photo storage and files, but its
limited - not if you have tens to hundreds of gigabytes of photos, and not unless you
have an unlimited-quota broadband account, and not unless you are happy to take many
days or weeks to push your content up to the cloud storage with our pitiful uplink
capacity.

"Broadband" and "Internet" have never been synonymous - one is the destination, the
other is the means to get there.

...and Merry Christmas Seasonings to you and to all Linkers !

P.




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