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VIRTUALISATION Some answers to Telstra 21Mbps Next G questions
VIRTUALISATION Some answers to Telstra 21Mbps Next G questions | Some answers to Telstra 21Mbps Next G questions |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Wednesday, 18 February 2009 | |
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Because Telstra was first, and has the fastest network, it was recognised by the Guinness World Records people for its achievement, but what are the real world speeds the network will deliver? Telstra said in a press release, and during the press conference (headed up by Australian Olympian Duncan Armstrong), that real world speeds would be between 550Kbps and 8Mbps (8000Kbps), which is more than double the previous real world speeds of 550Kbps to 3Mbps older 7.2Mbps-class devices delivered. Interestingly, Telstra’s press event wasn’t a traditional “press conference” followed by a public Q&A session, something I’ve seen Telstra do in the past with BigPond announcements, with any tricky questions kept to demo sessions afterwards. One of those tricky questions was how much of the Next G network was 21Mbps capable, or if parts of the network were yet to be upgraded. The answer I received was that the entire network has now been upgraded to 21Mbps, but as you might expect, there is a catch. Telstra says that those “up to” 21Mbps speeds are available in major cities and regional areas, but in areas that aren’t “up to speed”, the issue isn’t that the towers don’t have 21Mbps equipment, but that the backhaul in those areas is still to be upgraded. What this means in real terms is that roughly 75% of the network in those major cities and metropolitan areas has the backhaul to cope with the 21Mbps network, 80-85% will be complete by mid-2009, and the rest will have backhaul upgraded by the end of the year. Telstra also announced that by the end of the year, 42Mbps upgrades will have commenced, eclipsing the competition yet again (and probably ensuring an updated entry into the Guinness World Records publication). I asked whether a 42Mbps network meant end-users could expect real world speeds of up to 16Mbps, but Telstra representatives weren’t able to confirm as yet whether that should be expected. It should be noted that, during the speed test demo (which ironically showed the ABC’s iView catch-up TV application streaming what was, from memory, an episode of Catalyst) along with two downloads of separate 50MB files. Given that Telstra doesn’t let its business or BigPond customers access the ABC iView streams without chewing up download limits, I personally thought it might have been smarter for Telstra to show something from BigPond Movies to avoid this kind of paragraph in a news story, but ABC’s iView it was. Perhaps it’s a sign Telstra will eventually follow its competitors in adding the ABC’s iView to the unmetered content list… or it could simply be a sign of nothing at all beyond wanting to show something everyone seeing the demo would instantly recognize. In the “test scenario”, and on a network that would have had no other 21Mbps devices connecting to it, real world speeds reached up to 17Mbps – but once a lot of 21Mbps devices are on the network, this will naturally slow to the expected “up to” 8Mbps of real world speeds. A reader also listed a question in the comments section of my previous article, which I posed to Telstra representatives. I was also interviewed for Telstra’s “Now we are talking” website and the link to that video is on page 2, please read on. |
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