Some fantastic debate here. Really good to see so many people engaged in solving the issue. I’m going to refine the hypothesis and come back… hope you will too

Check out PCCW in Hong Kong if you want to see an example of how fast internet is used. PCCW have managed to successfully disaggregate the pay TV providers and provide SD and HD IPTV. http://www.nowbroadbandtv.com/eng/

Works really well.

Of course they have the following advantages

1. They have large number of multiple dwelling units that they run fibre to.

2. They are geographically quite small and densely populated

3. Their Pay TV model was quite poor and PCCW were able to negotiate some very good content deals as a result

4. Their IPTV business unit was not part of their broadband unit (whose strategy was clear – build great broadband everywhere)

1. If you want to cover 5km radius you’re going to need towers that are about 15 – 20 m high to get above the clutter. I note that Vodafone and Telecom are now deploying towers with lower heights in suburban areas (on light poles about 8m high – good shared used of infrastructure) for the reason that they are controlled activities under the RMA so relatively easy to get permission for.

2. Laws of physics apply – wireless will never be as effective as wired in terms of bit/customer. It’s shared bandwidth at the access end which is a physics constraint. Constraints at the DSLAM are engineered and can be increased significantly from currently used business cases permitting.

3. Really important to make a distinction between access speed and capacity. Faster access speed will improve broadband customer experience. Greater capacity (ie the ability to actually fill 24 M/sec consistently) allows different services – in particular IPTV. There are very few people who would pay even current TV rates in NZ to support simultaneous streaming of 2 x SD channels and 1 x TV channel.

4. With fibre to the cabinet it is possible that DSL cabinets have better backhaul that cellsites in some cases – probably out of date but most sites were on n x 2Mbit streams, with n being up to 4 for a high capacity site….

5. People dont use all the bandwidth all the time – so to Jason’s point you can probably support 10 times the amount you suggest. Still not 100% and I would concur that the current challenges faced by Woosh would not go away under this model.

6. There are significant stability benefits with being wired, particularly with IPTV. Even with 802.11 n , streaming video within the home with the reliability we have today is really problematic. meeting the same level of quality we have today (even with digital satellite) is a serious challenge

The key point to this post is that there is no easy way to make ubiquitous fast broadband happen, not that wireless is not the answer. Either way there will be pain in terms of either huge wedges of cash with long investment retunrs or changes to the NZ landscape with more radio sites. It’s time to bite the bullet, pick one of these options and just go for it. FibreCo is probably as good an answer to this as any.

Broadband over the local loop is not quiet as bad as you are making it out to be. For example:

1) ADSL2+ does delivers 15 – 24 Mbits/s at 800m and 12-16Mbits/s at 1.6km. (Depending on cross-talk and loop quality etc.)

2) The natural evolution after ADSL2+ is VDSL2. VDSL2 is almost here and will deliver 30-70 Mbits/s at 800m and 16+ Mbits/s at 1.6 km.

In other words, there is plenty of juice left in the local loop. Of course, the loop length needs to be shortened to accommodate the above speeds. (Got an article on my site covering ADSL and ADSL2+ vs. loop length, if you are interested.)

Also, Bwooce is asking what 24Mbits/s will be used for. Well IPTV and video of course! (To start out with.) In other words, triple play. Each simultaneous standard definition channel will use 2-4 Mbits/s and each high definition one 6-12Mbits/s. That bandwidth will be used up! (Reminds me of the old 640kb statement for PCs. Sorry.) Wait until YouTube delivers HD… Also, I am sure there are many bandwidth hungry applications coming, that we have not even thought about today.

IMHO, wireless will never be able to compete with wired for bandwidth and quality. And of course, wired will never be able to compete with wireless for mobility! The wireless speeds that are promoted by the vendors are mostly the theoretical shared “sector speeds” that will be used by many subscribers. This is not what each individual subscriber should expect to achieve consistently. And then we have the interference and noise to deal with in any wireless solution.

When we are talking about 300mbps, it doesn’t take many people with ADSL2+ usage (at 25mbps) to fill it up. 12 in fact. That’s 6% of the population covered by the cell. Since it’s pretty reasonable to assume that at least 5% of the customer population will be high usage people, there won’t be enough bandwidth to meet everyone’s expectations. In other words, you won’t be able to deliver better than ADSL2+ to enough people to make it worth the additional cost.

Woosh is learning the hard way that fixed mobile broadband is a hard sell. It is really for individuals who can’t get wired connections. Even with LTE, it will still be for that niche.

No. Not radical overhaul Paul. It needs to be completely killed. Here is an excellent article of why it should be killed.

It’s time to drive a stake thru the heart of the RMA

As I said first line, not an engineer but I’ll have a crack at some of this to defend the hypothesis.

1) The RMA needs radical overhaul
2) LTE covering 5km is still longer than the current planned cabinet density (2-2.5km), Granted that in mobile there is a contention issue. But how often are all 200 homes going to be online at the same time?
3) Battery life is a mobile handset issue and getting better. Notebooks are much better…I see your point, you’ve just gone a step further than I planned ie using mobile broadband to be mobile (nice!)
4) The standards and spectrum thing is outside my knowledge. I know they take time… can’t comment on what they are using it for but love to know more
5)Femto’s are interesting. I personally think they’re great but when you’re average home owner realises that it’s basically like having a cell site in the home…well the Nimby phenomenon kicks in
6)Bwooce, I’m with you what are you going to use if for. I’ve asked the same question here on Ben’s blog and got nothing back. Faster is a convenient extravagance… the reality is that there are SHEDLOADS still on dial up (who could be on ADSL) because for them that’s good enough

1) Planning permission for the thousands of additional cell towers.
2) LTE has an optimal cell size of 5km.
3) Since these are essentially microcells, the amount of base stations/switches would be impressive.
4) You still have bandwidth problems because while the demo may show 150mbps, that’s probably with 1 device consuming all of the spectrum in the cell.
5) Assuming 175Mbit/s max for the cell (wikipedia, from handset speeds), and according to this geekzone discussion:
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?ForumId=39&topicid=20368
You can assume ~200 homes per cabinet.

That’s 1Mbit/s per house. You’re better off with DSL. Even if you take it to 326Mbit/s which would be using the 4×4 antennas (again from wikipedia), that’s still only 1.6Mbit/s per subscriber.