Telstra laughs at Tony Abbott with 20Mbps mobile broadband
Telstra has rained on Tony Abbott’s plan to supply “up to 12Mbps” broadband as a cheaper alternative to Labor’s National Broadband Network by announcing the telco has switched on 20Mbps mobile broadband across the country.
Telstra’s Ultimate USB dongle gives users typical download speeds ranging from 1.1Mbps to 20Mbps across Australia’s capital city CBDs and associated airports, selected metropolitan hubs and more than 100 regional centres. Achieving better performance than the Coalition’s proposed alternative NBN network and delivering that performance today.
Telstra’s business customers are the first the enjoy the world best speeds announced today, with two thousand Ultimate USB modems allocated to Telstra business mobile broadband users before the devices go on sale the the general public later this year.
“Australians are telling us they can’t afford to be tied to the desk all day and these new speeds mean they can now access mobile broadband at speeds typically reserved for the office,” Telstra Business Group Managing Director, Deena Shiff said.
Telstra’s roll out of 20Mbps broadband will only cover 50 percent of the Australian population, begging the question of whether the private sector is best positioned to deliver high speed broadband across the entire country or whether Labor’s NBN will achieve better outcomes, particularly outside areas with high population density.
“These high-speed zones cover approximately 50 per cent of the Australian population and match the areas of highest customer demand and will make the frustration of waiting around for files to download a thing of the past.” Ms Shiff said.
Ms Shiff said the new speeds had the potential to increase how and where our small and large business customers work – boosting productivity in the process.
“Our customers have told us that they want higher speed mobile broadband so they can work more flexibly outside of the office and we are delighted to be the first in the world to offer these new blistering speeds on a national network.”
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[quote] will only cover 50 percent of the Australian population, begging the question of whether the private sector is best positioned to deliver high speed broadband [/quote]
and the answer is, NO.
I’d almost guarantee that I won’t be able to access it and I live in the heart of a major regional city, and we have many broadband “black spots”. Which SHOULD make us an “areas of highest customer demand”, but knowing Telstra’s past record I doubt we will be considered.
Dear Ms Shiff, please prove me wrong.
If Tony Abbott is proposing to provide 20mbs nationally then his parade has not been rained on by TELSTRA who only want to provide it to major centres.
Go for it Tony!!!
Sure speeds like this are great..
but there is one BIG issue there isn’t enough frequeny spectrum avalible to rollout a NWBN to the whole nation. this technology is allready pushed to its limits as anyone with mobile broadband would allready know the 8pm peak kills all speeds avalible..
Good news for businesses that operate within the coverage areas.
Though I’m not sure why they are only releasing it to businesses for now. Perhaps its so businesses get a bit of extra time without having to compete with everyone else for the bandwidth.
It often amazes me when in certain areas, surfing and downloading seems so slow over 3G/Next G, but the “premium” stuff Telstra sells like Mobile FOXTEL, will still stream fine…
Anyway… yes, the NBN is still very much needed by anyone who wants/needs consistently high speeds, low latency, greater choice, at an affordable price. (which rules out 3G entirely)
Cheers
Telstra has made limited nunmbers of the new devices available to business customers because we can’t get our hands on enough at this stage to make them available to everyone. Similarly, our coverage at launch covers approx 50 percent of the population, but it won’t end there. Of course Telstra will continually upgrade the Next G network – that’s inevitable – much the same as performance keeps improving and prices keep coming down over time.
“I’d almost guarantee that I won’t be able to access it and I live in the heart of a major regional city, and we have many broadband “black spots”. Which SHOULD make us an “areas of highest customer demand”, but knowing Telstra’s past record I doubt we will be considered.”
Completely agree I live in Killara, the whole North Shore gets poor coverage.
Dale
Abbott is often misrepresented. He plans on providing the uneconomic fibre backbone and extra towers. With no fibre NBN everyone will fast access anyway. The speed of wireless doubles every 2.5 years and the efficiency of large file formats increases over time. Labor NBN would be giving every household a $5000 personal loan with interest and then another $2000 to connect and use properly. Most people will not use the Labor NBN even if it was here in 2 years.
Tony Abbott is 100% correct. The NBN is generally a total waste of our monies and as an ex Telstra IT engineer on large corporate accounts, I know business and some private residences in the cities need cable – city to city and over the international cable, but most retail private clients are getting sufficient speed over wireless and adsl+2. What they really want is adequate speed with economic plans. As the wireless networks upgrade there will be no need for the NBN or the massive expenditure. Don’t listen to Telstra management – they are a load of crap with the blind leading the blind trying to hang onto their jobs without anyone discovering their inadequacies.
@Will $2000 to connect and use properly?
lol, that’s some mighty expensive cable you must be using. Or did you fall for the FUD that was being spread about needing an electrician to wire the in…
That’s like saying you need an electrician to run your speaker cables, or hook your new DVD player up to your TV. lol @ some people.
And yes, wireless (as in personal wireless networks) are getting faster over time. In fact, at the moment 802.11n is capable of 300Mbit/s, which means that you wouldn’t need to run any wires to take full advantage of an NBN home connection. By the time the NBN are offering 1Gbit/s speeds to homes, there most likely will be a wireless solution for that as well. If not, then $20 worth of Ethernet cable should suffice (Plug and play – no electrician needed).
@Ted, “most retail private clients are getting sufficient speed over wireless and adsl+2″
Speak for yourself and not for all those people stuck on congested exchanges getting a quarter of the speed that they pay for, switching to 3G wireless is not an option for most people because of the ridiculous price of wireless data.
“What they really want is adequate speed with economic plans.”
Yep, that pretty much sums up why we need the NBN. So we can have affordable, adequate speed that can be increased as needed.
The unreliable, inconsistent, “best case scenario” that you get from 3G and ADSL, is not an alternative to the NBN proposal.
Its just something we will unfortunately be stuck with if the NBN gets canned.
Cheers
So if wireless is getting so much faster and better all the time, why do we even need cabling?
It just highlights yet again how hopelessly out of touch Labor’s NBN is.
Well isn’t this just dandy. Telstra bragging about how good their mobile BB service has now become, yet they fail to supply a decent cable service to numerous suburbs in major cities around Australia. I live 3 klm from the pacific hwy, between Brisbane & Gold Coast, and all I can get is the original ADSL….. figure that out? Mobile BB is out of the question as, our mobile phones are just about useless, the mobile phone coverage is just as bad. Good on ya Telstra, you can’t even sort out a problem for 300 residences 20 klms from Brisbane, what kind of stuff up are you going to make of the MBB service???
So Telstra and Thodey finally did another number on the Government and offloaded the network that they have purposefully run down over the past 10 years, knowing full well that PSTN is a total loss and they can now devote all of their time and energy to wireless comms. The Government still can’t see this will be the future. Any non political fool could see that the network should never have been in the T1 package. Telstra should have been cut loose to compete with the other telco’s, but John Howard could only see the bulk money by selling Telstra as a total package. Now that the future fund has lost most of our and the Governments money by holding Telstra shares too long, the monies selling the network did no good anyhow.
So its still not too late for Stephen Conroy, the boffoon of the Labor Party to be sacked and this unworkable NBN be rationalised to give the bush 100mps via satellite and wireless, while leaving the cities to work it out with a mix of comms. Of course Telstra will have to get rid of the Deana Shiff’s who know nothing about the real world and are solely academics who guarantee to bring all good enterprises down.