I hope many of you are already aware that Engineers Australia has designated 2012 as the Year of the Regional Engineering Team (YoRET). Regional Engineering Teams, more than most of us, will be conscious of the challenge presented by the “digital divide” being the barrier to affordable access and use of digital economy tools in regional and rural Australia. It’s not as bad as it used to be and many localities will in due course benefit from ubiquitous affordable high speed broadband delivered by the National Broadband Network or whatever other scheme is in place by the time it reaches everywhere. Indeed the plan is to deliver ubiquitous affordable high speed broadband to all locations with 3% of premises receiving the service by satellite service, 4% by a terrestrial wireless service and the remainder by fibre to the premises/home (FTTH). An interim satellite service will be replaced by a recently announced purpose built satellite network for the 3% of premises targeted for satellite service. Whilst FTTH will deliver up to 100Mbps (more is feasible), wireless and satellite access will deliver a 12Mbps/1Mbps service. It’s unlikely that these lower speeds to rural areas will materially impact their ability to participate in the digital economy.
On the other hand urban Australians are accustomed to carrying their communications capability in their pocket. Mobile use is often problematic outside towns in rural areas resulting in a significant digital divide. Mobile satellite services are available albeit with relatively heavy use costs. Urban Australians can so readily take their mobile telephony and computing capabilities for granted whilst regional engineering teams cannot.
Technology can help to some extent including extending the reach of cells (at least to full line of sight) by various techniques including use of lower frequency bands. The reach of optical fibre networks in NBN should facilitate lower cost implementation of additional coverage. Emerging technologies such as femtocells could provide lower cost options using NBN access. However it remains unlikely that, for instance, all rural highways will be covered in the foreseeable future, leaving the only option inferior mobile satellite capability.
Pragmatically the engineer understands that it is simply uneconomic to provide 100% terrestrial wireless coverage in Australia. Some improved coverage would result if carriers collaborated to avoid unnecessary duplication of networks and were prepared to share access in marginal coverage areas through appropriate roaming agreements.
Network infrastructure duplication does represent a serious economic cost in marginal economic locations. Those following the development of the Universal Service Obligation in the NBN era will be aware of the ongoing obligation to maintain copper wire networks to deliver the universal telephone service in areas served by NBN wireless or satellite. Yes, this is surprising recognising the challenge of maintaining a copper network in the rural environment and the long standing criticism of the services provided would seem to make rural Australia the last place one would wish to maintain a copper network. Perhaps wireless and satellite delivery of Voice over IP services is not considered sufficiently reliably however that would seem to be a technical challenge which will be overcome. Continuing to maintain a copper wire network duplicating a sophisticated broadband network simply doesn’t seem to be a good solution!
Please note that the views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Engineers Australia.
The rural copper network might be being retained in a similar fashion to the changeover to Digital Free to Air TV in that TV operators were required to maintain their analog transmission services alongside digital services over the past 10 or so years with the analog services being phased out over the next couple of years. TV operators were highly subsidised annually during the transition to cover costs, but the main reasons for maintaining the analog service was to wean people off analog as the took up the digital service and for the older less technically minded people to have their children set up the box for them.
I used to work for a TV repair shop in Canberra and whenever the power went out the phone rang off the hook for us to come out and set up old age retired folk's VCR's - many of this age group are simply incapable of dealing with any thing other than turning the box on with a remote.
Same thing happens in the Banks here in Coffs Harbour. Pension day see the queues at 9:30 AM at the Banks and other Banking outlets. They simply don't get on with those Tellers in a wall and prefer to Bank the way they always have.
So to the copper wire issue. Same thing here. Coffs Harbour is one big giant retirement village and apart from youth and business, the older population, at least the majority of them, just need the phone they've got now and don't want all that new technology mumbo jumbo.
For myself, as an engineer, technology is my business and so I welcome the NBN, when it finally arrives in town for all of the obvious reasons and if it were up to me I'd have the copper ripped up, melted down and some of the costs of the NBN recouped as there must be millions in telephony copper strung up and under the ground that could be put to better use. But I'm happy to wait until there isn't a social need to maintain it for the current older generation in say, 10 - 15 years.
Posted by: Helmut Schiretz | 03/07/2012 at 09:49 AM