Telstra will be interesting to watch....they would be a pretty good candidate for GSM 1x.
news.com.au
Mobile growth 8 to 10%: Telstra
Alan Wood
November 20, 2002
TELSTRA says mobile phone subscriber growth in Australia is running at 8-10 per cent a year, as the industry enters a new stage of aggressive competition.
Telstra Mobile group managing director David Thodey said nearly 400,000 new subscribers joined the market in the September quarter with 12.8 million Australians now owning a mobile phone.
"We would expect about 1-1.2 million subscribers to be added to the industry every year for the next two years," he told the Australian Telecom Lecture Series.
Mr Thodey said of the 400,000 new subscribers, approximately 197,000 joined Telstra, 110,000 joined Singapore Telecommunications-owned Optus, 98,000 joined Vodafone Australia with Hutchison Telecommunications (Australia), which operates Orange, connecting the bulk of the remainder.
"The industry in Australia is entering a new stage of aggressive competition and marketing that will begin this Christmas and continue for at least the next 12 months," he said.
Mr Thodey said wireless data revenues continued to grow because of SMS short message service growth, with more than 250 million SMS messages sent in Australia every month.
Mr Thodey said the 1XRTT technology would be Telstra's preferred network technology in terms of a mobile network upgrade for third generation services.
He said Australia's largest telco had two options for a mobile network upgrade with 1XRTT outweighing EDGE/WCDMA (wideband code division multiple access).
Both networks provide technology allowing the transfer of internet, multimedia, video and other high capacity applications on 3G mobile phones.
Mr Thodey said Telstra had run a 1XRTT network test operation in Melbourne for the past six months and so far feedback had been very encouraging in terms of connectivity speeds and usability of handsets and devices.
Telstra rival Hutchison Telecommunications (Australia) has maintained it is on track for plans to launch an Australian 3G network in the first quarter of 2003.
Mr Thodey said Telstra would only build 3G when it saw good cost justification for that, and network implementation would reflect customer demand.
"While Telstra has not committed to a national commercial roll-out of 1XRTT, at this stage we are favouring the technology," he said.
He added Telstra could quickly upgrade its existing CDMA network to provide 1XRTT mobile solutions at lower cost than other 3G technologies.
Mr Thodey said long-term Telstra saw an 80/20 split between GSM (Global Standard for Mobile telephony) and CDMA networks.
Telstra has also announced a $10 million investment to bring high speed internet access to more outer metropolitan and regional customers in 2003.
Telstra Networks and Technology Group managing director Doug Campbell said a number of initiatives would boost broadband availability for both Telstra retail and wholesale customers. |
