[AusNOG] Netflix in AU, break up Go4, or TPG peering breakup?

[Paul Jones]

That mirrors my own thoughts as well.
For years I’ve been hearing that wireless will one day overtake wired connections, and that people have been dropping their land lines in favour of wireless etc… and then it finally happens – at about the same time that people start saying that the adsl market is saturated and don’t expect any more growth. My first thought was along the lines of WTF?? So I go and dig out the stats and sure enough wireless/wired ratio was around 51/49 ish. I had also recently read the annual reports from people like iiNet, TPG, Telstra etc. who all show their adsl subscriber base increasing.
This made me think “well someone is losing a lot of customers then!” if the overall number of connections was shrinking, but I didn’t think there was that many customers left in the rest of the industry.

I had another look at the ABS stats again and to my surprise (and relief) saw that the actual raw number of wired connections was still increasing (albeit slowly) and had never been in a state of decline. It’s just that the overall market for connections has shifted from a “per premises” to a “per person” metric, and now it’s moving towards “per device” as well. It stands to reason that there are more people than premises, therefore there should also be more wireless connections than wired. (Especially given there is more than one mobile per person on average)

So overall I would argue that the market for fixed line connections hasn’t ever gone backwards, and is never likely to until such times as we can replace “a box” in the garage/study with a different box that happens to have a sim card and antenna, and have our customers not really notice the difference, either in QOS, $$$, or GB.

Wireless is an entirely new and predominantly different market, but it unfortunately gets classified in the same category as fixed line. Same with M2M, where a gargantuan quota is 300 MB.

Cheers,
Paul

From: AusNOG [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Robert Hudson
Sent: Wednesday, 23 July 2014 9:37 PM
To: Mark ZZZ Smith
Cc: ausnog at lists.ausnog.net; Paul Brooks
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Netflix in AU, break up Go4, or TPG peering breakup?

On 23 July 2014 20:57, Mark ZZZ Smith <markzzzsmith at yahoo.com.au<mailto:markzzzsmith at yahoo.com.au>> wrote:

I still think it is significant that around half of all Internet connections in Australia are wireless.

The only thing surprising about that is that the figure you've quoted isn't higher.  That said, I find that particular statistic to be pretty useless - and here's why.

In my household, I have three wireless broadband connections (two mobile phones with data plans, plus a pre-paid 4G WiFi AP) and a single wired connection.  And I don't have children who have their own mobile phones or devices - that number could easily climb to six or more wireless connections without any significant effort - and that's without having extended family in the house - and it's becoming more and more common to have more than two generations in a household.

Wireless is brilliant for certain things.  Consuming large amounts of data is not one of those things (at least not in this market, I acknowledge that the bottleneck in Australia isn't the capability of the technology).

The consumption of content over wireless in this country is still very small.  It's possible to get a ridiculously large quota (I get 150GB a month if memory serves, I honestly don't even think about quota on my ADSL service any more, but I know I'm WAY below the maximum quota available on basic consumer ADSL services) on wired for less than I pay for 1.5GB a month on Telsta 4G (on which I can't even download a single DVD ISO without paying stupidly obscene excess data charges - assuming it works at all when I'm on the move, given even the best 4G network in the country still has black spots and massive congestion issues at times).

Back to my first line - what is more interesting than the number of raw wired and wireless connections is the volume of data consumed on wired vs wireless connections - wireless connections have been relatively static for years in terms of how much data is downloaded per month (and have actually gone backwards slightly over the last two years), whereas the amount of data consumed by wired connections seems to double every couple of years (if even that long) - and I bet if you found information on the data produced from wireless and wired connections, it'd be even more glaringly obviously biased in favour of wired).

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