The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
HSDPA now seems to be shaping up as a very viable technology to deliver broadband in rural and regional Australia, but many pundits claim that the carriers simply do not have sufficient bandwidth to sever large numbers of subscribers, and three separate networks is not the most efficient way to sue bandwidth.
I hope this does not turn out to be a rerun of the mid nineties HFC debacle when Telstra and Optus spent billions dolling out duplicate broadband infrastructure in metropolitan areas. Protestations to the government from many industry participants fell on deaf ears and the debacle continued with only one winner: Telstra/Foxtel.
We don't need three separate 3G networks in sparsely populated areas of Australia, we need one that maximises use of spectrum and network resources with competition at the service level. It's the same argument as for FTTN. But whereas it is prohibitively costly and highly impracticable to duplicate FTTN infrastructure it is all to easy to duplicate, or triplicate cellular infrastructure.
David Bass
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