Archive for October 2013
At Telstra’s Investor Briefing yesterday Warwick Bray ED Mobile and Wireline gave a picture of Telstra’s mobile network achievements and plans. This is summarised on the chart above. The full presentation pack from the briefing is here.
Bray pointed to mobile network capital expenditure of $1.2Bn in 2012/13 and a plan for the same in 2013/14. He repeated David Thodey’s AGM statement that Telstra would take LTE coverage from 66% in June 2013 to 85% by Christmas – always good to agree with the boss. Also mirroring Thodey’s AGM words Bray said Telstra was selectively deploying carrier agregation in LTE using its refarmed 1800MHz and more recently 900 MHz spectrum. Telstra is sourcing Category 4 (3GPP Release 8) devices for these deployments which could enable speeds up to 150Mbps by aggregating the two spectrum bands.
Bray’s slide points to Telstra’s trialling carrier aggregation with 700 and 1800 MHz spectrum and looking to source LTE Category 6 (3GPP Release 10) devices which can theoretically get to 300 Mbps down and 50Mbps uplink. Of course Telstra (and Optus) don’t get to use the 700 MHz spectrum, which they purchased in May this year until January 2015 so don’t hold your breath for these break neck speeds just yet. Telstra has a focus on pushing the adoption of this particular band of LTE 700MHz spectrum to be used in Australia termed APT700 (Asia Pacific Telecommunity 700MHz or sometimes APAC700) so that mass produced devices will support this band (3GPP band 28). For example the just released iPhone 5S supports the USA 700 MHz bands but not the APT700 Band 28. There is a very good White Paper by Ericsson explaining the adoption status and potential for APT700 on the GSA web site here.
One other interesting initiative on Warrick Bray’s slide is the trial with Ericsson of LTE-B. This is broadcast LTE which is based on 3GPP eMBMS (evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services). It allows the same content to be sent to multiple devices in the process relieving network capacity for symultaneous streaming of video for example. Telstra had originally announced this trial with Ericsson in February this year. Mike Wright from Telstra provides some more insight into this in an item reported in the Australian here.
Crown Castle has just announced its purchase and 10 year lease of respectively 600 and 9,100 mobile towers from AT&T in the USA in a deal woth $4.85Bn. AT&T will lease back capacity on the sites for $1,900 per site per month and Crown will look to getting additional tenants on the site to make the deal profitable for itself. Crown Castle owns or operates by lease arrangement some 30,000 mobile sites.
Crown Castle owns around 1,600 towers in Australia. These have been acquired over the years since 2000 from Optus, Vodafone and Hutchison. The original mobile towers acquired by Crown were 700 from Optus in 2000 for $200M then 669 from Vodafone in 2001 for $130M. Another 140 were added from Vodafone in 2008 for around $40M.
The business model in Australia and the USA are similar. Crown buys the somewhat lazy tower assets and through deals it has with all mobile carriers and other radio operators leases space on the structures. The arrangement provides Crown a viable business while facilitating the sharing of towers and to an extent reduces the proliferation of cellular mobile structures.
There is a very interesting ARS Technica article on how Google is increasingly gaining control over the originally open source Android.
Ron Amandeo the author says that Google is intent on locking Android phone manufacturers into using the Google official version, rules and vision of Android rather than third party derivatives based on the open source code. Some like Amazon and many Chinese manufacturers are bucking the Google system but as the article describes Google is making it as hard for them as it can. Ron Amandeo’s article by is here.
At Telstra’s AGM CEO David Thodey pointed to substantial growth and investment in Telstra’s mobile business both in Australia and in Hong Kong.
David claimed that Telstra in Australia now had 15.1 million mobile serives an increase of 1.257 million in the past 12 months. Figures for Hong Kong where Telstra’s CSL has 1010, One2Free and New World mobile services increased by 425,000. CSL has 4.2 of Hong Kong’s 16.7 million mobiles.
Thodey said that Telstra had invested $1.2Bn in its mobile network last financial year and would invest the same amount in 2013/14 year. In addition Telstra had spent $0.8Bn to renew existing spectrum licenses (mainly for their 850 and 1800 MHz spectrum) and $1.3Bn for new 4G spectrum (700 and 2600MHz).
David Thodey said that Telstra now had 3.2 million 4G devices on its network and would extend the reach of 4G from the current 66% of the population to 85% by Christmas 2013 maintaining, he said, Telstra’s lead in mobile speed and coverage. On 4G speed Thodey referred to trials of LTE Advanced (3GPP Release 10) on the Sunshine Coast which by combining (Carrier Aggregation) 1800 and 900 MHz spectrum was able to achieve real world speeds of 90 to 180 Mbps.
Thodey said Telstra is now working to rollout 900MHz spectrum aggregated with their existing 1800MHz on the 4G LTE network. This 900MHz spectrum has been refarmed from the Telstra GSM network which today is only lightly loaded as customers have migrated to 4G.
Both Optus and Vodafone have also refarmed 900MHz spectrum but both have used this in their 3G networks. With spectrum efficiency nearly three times higher with LTE 4G compared to WCDMA/HSPA 3G Telstra is looking to get the maximum benefit from this valuable low banded 900MHz spectrum in advance of the availability of the 700MHz 4G spectrum which will be able to be used from January 2015.
You can see the webcast of the CEO’s presentation at the AGM at here.
Roy Morgan reports that only 27% of mobile users in Australia have a phone over two years old. With over 30 million services in operation in Australia this would imply more than 10 million devices falling out of use each year. Their report is here.
With the Australian Cellular Industry’s Mobile Muster reporting that they are recycling circa 850,000 mobiles per year you wonder what is happening to the rest. Mobile Muster says that there are 23 million mobiles stored in homes unused. With around 10 million falling out of use per year adding to the 23 million existing top draw mobiles we are building up a big stockpile or, more likely, adding to the high tech content of our wheelie bins.
Roy Morgan reports not unexpectedly that Telstra customers have the higher percentage of greater than 2 y.o. handsets at 30% Optus has 25% and Vodafone 22%. Also not unexpected is that the brand of mobile over 2 y.o. is topped by Nokia 30% (reflective of past glory) with Samsung 21% and iPhone 18%.
The just released ITU ICT Facts and Figures Report shows that 2.7 billion people have access to the internet 38% of the world’s population.
750 million out of 1.8 billion households in the world (41%) have fixed internet connection. The speed of the service varies dramatically with South Korea Japan and Hong Kong having around 90% of fixed services at speeds 10 Mbps and above and all of Africa having virtually no services at this speed.
The ITU also reported that there were 2.1 billion mobile broadband services active in the world with a annual growth rate of 40%. This represents 30 services per 100 population in the world.
Developing countries have more than half (55%) of the mobile broadband services (nearly 1.2 billion) while they have almost half of the worlds fixed internet services.
The ITU estimate that the worlds mobile services at 6.8 billion in 2013 is fast approaching the 7.1 billion world population.