What future for the NBN when customers want mobile broadband?

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 05 August 2009 06:26

Opinion and Analysis

Strand's description of WCDMA/LTE as fibre in the sky is rather simplistic. If it is fibre in the sky it is, in densely populated areas at least a very short fibre. A WCDMA/LTE network able to deliver peak rates comparable to the 100Mbps promised by the NBN to a large percentage of users would need either much spectrum and/or more base stations in densely populated areas and fibre backhaul from those base stations.

It would in effect be a fibre to the node network with wireless tails. (According to Ericsson, Australia's mobile operators are already expressing interest in using the NBN for backhaul from their base stations).

The Government and supporters of the NBN argue that the fibre is an investment in the future, that it will have a useful life of up to 50 years and that as technology evolves capacity will increase. All this is true but at the end of the day the ambitious $43b NBN plan is not predicated on sound analysis of likely demand, estimates of what services users will want, what these will cost and how much users will be willing to pay.

If Strand is correct, perhaps it would be better to take a longer term view to try and better understand when the desire for multiple really high bandwidth services that mobile networks are unable to deliver will tip the balance of demand away from mobility and in favour of fibre to the home.

On the basis of Strand's and ABI's forecasts, a couple years down the track we could see a scenario in Australia where the Government backed NBN is struggling to sign up customers but where mobile broadband is booming and the cellular operators are begging for more spectrum. That would present the Government with a most interesting dilemma!