Wireless Broadband for Regional Australia

In September I gave a series of talks on broadband in regional Australia. , including the WiMAX/IEEE 802.16 wireless service being set up be the OPEL consortium (with a government subsidy). In October Professor Reg Coutts, Director of the ACS Telecommunications Board, had a very useful article published comparing different WiMax options and 3G for rural broadband.

Professor Coutt argues that the 5.8GHz band Opel proposes to use is not suitable for broad WiMAX deployment, but that 2.3GHz would be for rural Australia except the Northern Territory. As he points out most of the 2.3GHz band is held by another company, Austar. Unwired already provide a service in some Australian cities based on "pre-WiMAX" technology (I use a similar service from iBurst).

I share Professor Coutt's skepticism over the claims for early adoption of WiMax and, as he points out, rooftop antennas will be needed to get adequate range out of it in regional Australia.

However, in my opinion, it is ultimately an issue of economics not technology: can Optel get enough customers for their WiMax service to provide a return on their investment? One way this might happen is by the customers paying for more of the cost of the infrastructure. By requiring the customers to have longer range roof mounted antennas, Opel can build fewer base stations. If they were to also implement a mesh network, or WiFi redistribution, that would further spread the cost and may make the system pay for itself quicker.

...WiMAX has arisen very rapidly in parallel with mobile technologies such as 3G as a serious alternative in many applications. The purpose of this article is to help separate fact from hyperbole that inherently pervades the technology space. ...

WiMAX conforms to two broad standards, the IEEE802.16d standard decided in 2004 for which certified equipment is available and the other mobile WiMAX IEEE802.16e standard decided in 2005 for which certified equipment has yet to appear. ...

In Australia Telstra has rolled out its 3G network Next G at 850MHz to encompass the earlier rural CDMA network which in addition to providing 3G mobile services can with the upgrade to HSPA offer wireless broadband service to rural users. ...

A new player OPEL, jointly owned by Optus and Elders, now has won the Government contract to roll out a wireless broadband service by June 2009 in competition with Telstra based on WiMAX. ...

As well as doing a broad comparative assessment of WiMAX and HSPA for their claimed benefits, my analysis has considered a "hypothetical rural town" where DSL is range limited to 4km from a central exchange. From our modelling and canvassing of industry-wide perspectives, it is my opinion that both WiMAX at 2.3GHz and HSPA at 850MHz for rural application can provide similar user data rates of 8-12 Mbit/s expected of ADSL1 and ADSL2+ within what is termed the dominance zone of a single base station site. ...

While the dominance zone would be about 8km out from the base station, the service area for acceptable service would extend beyond this out to nearly 20km for WiMAX and 35km for HSPA, but where the user data rate would drop to about 2Mbit/s. ...

In summary, I believe that the WiMAX technology developments will divert the longer term technology evolution towards 4G which will exploit the flexibility strengths of WiMAX.

However, in my opinion it is critical that Australia maintain its credibility as a sophisticated, timely adopter of the best of global technology and should resist being used as a test market to reduce technology risk for global suppliers rather than supporting sustainable rural infrastructure investment. ...

From: "Rural broadband wireless", Prof Reg Coutts,Information Age, 23/10/2007 00:37:41