The timing couldn’t not have been more exquisite as Bill Morrow, the chief executive of Malcolm Turnbull and Ziggy Switkowski’s shambling joke of a national broadband network, was grilled about the fast-emerging 5G mobile broadband technology at a Senate hearing on April 10.
Morrow’s appearance when he admitted the company was trialing super-fast 5G wireless to plug gaps but did not intend to compete with established mobile companies, came less than a week after he announced he would, like a rat, abandon the sinking NBN ship. Because while providing NBN Co with an essential fix, the same technology would well consign the project to its final doom.
Morrow’s background is in mobile tech — he had been airlifted into Australia to save the Vodafone-Hutchison joint venture, when under-investment in networks finally caught up with them, sending customer numbers spiraling to an abyss. He was previously CEO of Vodafone Europe and President at Vodafone KK in Japan.
With each month. it is ever clearer that multi technology mix (MTM) NBN is a bandaid solution no commercial company would touch: an unholy mishmash of various fibre technologies, ageing copper wire based ASDL and all-but-obsolete hybrid fiber coaxial cable, whose 1990s rollout wars sent telco competition in Australia to the edge of oblivion. MTM, earmarked for millions of NBN homes, is now next to useless. This week Morrow admitted this, in so many words. He has no idea how big a hole this has punched in the business.
The next round of mobile technology, 5G, with its significantly improved speed (eventually 20 gigabytes per second), capacity, connectivity and efficiency will eat the NBN’s lunch. Already, 4G offers speeds far in excess of anyone stuck more than a few hundred metres from and the ADSL “nodes” that make up the majority of the MTM NBN. ADSL speeds deteriorate very quickly between the node and the house, and the distance from home to node can often be one to two kilometers long. Older copper only exacerbates this.
Put simply, even without the impending arrival of 5G, much of the tech used in the NBN is already being rendered obsolete by mobile tech.
It’s not only competitive technology that threatens the NBN’s ever-changing but always precarious business model, but the intensely competitive structure of Australia’s mobile sector. Three major national networks — Telstra, Optus and Morrow’s old shop Vodafone — all fiercely compete for customers. The NBN can only offer, at a wholesale level, several tiers of vanilla, uncustomised services at various speeds for resale.
The mobile companies have what NBN Co does not: multi-million strong, fairly loyal customer bases, both regular consumers and small to mid sized businesses that power Australia’s economy. In recent months they have intensified competition, not just with each other but with the NBN, bringing prices down and ramping up the size data packages concurrently with the convenience of mobility and user-friendly smart phones.
It’s too early to judge what will really happen to the NBN, but Morrow could only ever work with what he was given: a shit sandwich that Turnbull and Switkowski created with the sole aim of palming off a mess handed to them by Peta Credlin.
The rest, including the increasingly benighted NBN, is history; and so too will be the PM, if there is any justice for the Australian taxpayer.
Eh “told you so” says every Australian IT expert ever. Why didn’t the MSM listen in 2013 when we decried Malcolm Turnbull’s Mess (MTM).
This
Agree with HFC and FTTN/ADSL being obsolete, but Fibre is not obsolete.
New wireless technologies like 5G are great if the spectrum has been allocated, and not many are on the same mobile basestation. As soon as you are distant from the basestation, or there are a lot of people on the basestation they get very slow very fast. After all it is a shared medium.
The bulk of the traffic will still be done with fibre [there are fibre links to basestations]. Fixed wireless might be suitable for lower speed / volume traffic, but it will need to be dimensioned properly. Mobile wireless is great for data on the go, but not for large volume data or guaranteed high speeds.
Don’t often agree with you MS but on this I’m with you 100%.
Just how much have these shit sandwich makers cost the taxpayer?
They are a perfect follow up act after the 3 Amigo’s we were blessed with by Howard and Costello to sell off Telstra.
. . . and the very last paragraph identifies the true focus of this entire debacle. The Prime Minister is the sole responsible individual. He alone, for pure political/ personal gain committed we taxpayers to an horrendous national debt. No if’s no but’s.
Australian capacity to compete globally is crippled. Our budding, next generation of tech heads / entrepreneurs have been knee capped; and will have little choice other than to seek opportunities overseas. Short of Menzies selling scrap iron to Japan; can I recall a more costly kick in the guts than The Prime Minister’s disregard of our nation’s critical priorities.
Agree with all your points Graybul.
On the bright side, I reckon our young bright sparks will survive and thrive in spite of the horrors we have in leadership.
True RL, but why make them jump through hoops knowing a superior system would cover this wide brown land, enhance rural/remote locations as well as the metro interactive, stimulation coffee shop learning and exploration exchange centres and . . . lock Australia into competitive state of the art technological leadership groups?
Well mine have all gone to Berlin. Three bright IT grads. A bummer for me personally and a loss to the country IMO (interest declared). They are unlikely to return in the foreseeable, now having long-term UK/Euro partners as well.
No 5G will not do this as it has a limited range and there is nothing in Australia that works with it. It may download fast but it is not a high traffic set up. 4G does not in general produce these speeds, I use it and the cost and limits are high and low respectivley. The rest of the article is correct about the bungle, but fibre will beat wireless in terms of reliability and download limit.
“Do once , do it right, do it with fibre” Alun Davies of Armidale, former Telstra staffer circa 2010