Stuart Corner
Sunday, 08 October 2006 03:54
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 4
Given that Telstra was launching its 850MHz network on an 'investor day' to hundreds of market analysts you might have thought they would have been trying to tell shareholders how the $1 billion investment was going to produce returns and when.
But no, the overwhelming message was of how the network will bring unprecedented download speeds to an unprecedented percentage of the population (3.6Mbps to 98 percent). Listening to the presentation and knowing no better you would have thought the service the answer to the prayers of every rural Australian beyond the reach of ADSL, which of course it isn't.
Statements like this, in the press release on the event, only serve to compound the confusion. "[Telstra CEO Sol] Trujillo said Next G is an integral part of Telstra's plan to bring broadband to all Australians, no matter where they live, and to transform Telstra into a media communications powerhouse.
Technically, Next G certainly can bring broadband to almost all Australians but economically, no way. Just a small issue of price. But that was not mentioned anywhere in the presentation, and such information was hard to find.
To promote the new service and the new 850MHz handsets, there were several display stands at the investor day, chock full of brochures and staffed by eager Telstra employees. I read the press release, I grabbed all the brochures. Could find no pricing anywhere on simply using the Next G network as a broadband data access service. No plans at $x per month for y gigabytes of download data.
