Telstra’s DC-HSPA+ upgrade promises extremely high-speed wireless broadband across much of Australia. As ever, capital city business types are the focus for its rollout, but how well does it perform in the rural areas which are suddenly the focus of national politics? Today I headed to Dubbo in the central west of NSW to find out.
Broadband is clearly on people’s minds out here. Quite unprompted, my taxi driver offers his own definition of “the Australian version of broadband”: someone from the far west of the state driving to Dubbo to see their banker and their insurance agent and do their major shopping once every six months.
Operating at a rather different pace, I’m on a lightning morning visit to Dubbo with the goal of testing just how well the new Ultimate USB device works far away from the CBD environments I usually inhabit (and to which it is initially being marketed). I’m travelling to a lot of places performing that task over the next two weeks, and Dubbo is perhaps the most remote. Despite that, it does appear on Telstra’s list of supported locations for DC-HSPA+, so I’m curious to see how well it performs.
But even before the testing begins, it turns out that my taxi driver is something of a communications buff. He tells me where all the main mobile towers in town are located, and offers the bonus advice that if your mobile phone works at the South Dubbo Tavern, it will work pretty much anywhere.
He’s also firmly in favour of wireless broadband to get higher speeds. The way he tells it, fibre has already been a failure. “They wired us all up with fibre but they couldn’t get the switching right,” he says. I don’t argue with him (arguing with taxi drivers is never wise unless it’s about where you live). I can’t help quietly wondering though if this is some confused blending of non-activated fibre being laid and Telstra not letting anyone into the local exchange for ADSL upgrades, as it has been known to do.
What I do know about Dubbo’s communications infrastructure is that Telstra’s Next G mobile network it has recently been upgraded to allow DC-HSPA+, which potentially offers speeds of up to 20Mbps on the Ultimate USB (even if it rarely reaches those in practice). I also know that (unlike many other rural towns) Telstra doesn’t restrict its claim about its availability to the Dubbo CBD. So in the surrounds of the Orana Mall on the eastern side of the city, I sit down to see how well the connection works.
The answer to that question is: rather well. In my mall tests (using Speedtest.net), I got a download speed of 6.7Mbps, and upload speed of 1.2Mbps. The connection I got at Dubbo Airport (on the opposite side of town) didn’t claim to be dual channel, but still managed 6.4Mbps and 1.95Mbps respectively. In both cases, it also stayed connected without dramas, which is just as important as raw speed.
To put this into perspective: I got better performance from the Ultimate USB modem in a Dubbo shopping mall than I did in my own apartment in Sydney (3.56Mbps download/0.53Mbps upload). I also got better performance than I do from my wired ADSL connection (4.24Mbps upload/0.31Mbps download). And the speeds were slightly better than the Lifehacker offices in the Sydney CBD (6.15Mbps download/0.98Mbps upload), which is likely to be where a lot of these modems initially get sold. In other words: nobody’s getting 20Mbps, but Dubbo’s doing about as well as everybody else.
A direct comparison isn’t entirely fair, of course. I almost certainly have more choices for ADSL2+ providers at my local exchange than most Dubbo residents, so I’ve got more options to start with. Telstra doesn’t claim that the area of Sydney where I live is specifically covered by the enhanced service, and I suspect the aged wiring in my unit block might be a restriction on my connection speeds that’s not going away in a hurry.
Nor would it be fair to conclude that this means that wireless in general (or Next G in particular) would solve all our broadband woes cheaply and easily. It’s more than likely that I’m the only person utilising the improved network today, given the modems have only just been released and can’t be purchased unless you’re a large enterprise.
If the same service was on offer to the 30,000-odd people who reside directly in Dubbo, I doubt I’d see the same performance. And that’s before taking into account the 100,000+ people in the wider area for whom Dubbo is the commercial centre.
There’s no suggestion so far that DC-HSPA+ technology will be extended beyond Telstra’s current “50% of the population target”, though that could of course change once we have an election result. But there’d certainly need to be a few more towers to get to that goal. My taxi driver unwittingly undermined his own pro-wireless enthusiasm when he acknowledged that fact: “Of course, the average mobile phone can’t throw a signal more than about four blocks.”
A single-focus modem might do a little better, but there’s clearly a lot of work to be done. Nonetheless, the fact that the network performed so well at this stage shows that rural Australia doesn’t automatically have to be a broadband backwater. Whether it can manage that in other states and locations is something I’ll be testing over the next couple of weeks.
Telstra logo.
On Monday, Australian telecommunications company Telstra has introduced dual carrier  standard for broadband Internet business customers in the  network. This is the first time this technology is being introduced on national scale. The bandwidths the users can deploy increased into two to three times, with Telstra becoming the world’s fastest national mobile broadband service. The switch started with enabling the service for premium users. After some feedback, Telstra may expand the plan.

=== Introduction ===

The higher speeds for wireless are intended to simplify and ease multitasking of users.

John Paitaridis, Telstra's executive director, network products and services in Enterprise & Government, said "One of the reasons we decided to launch first to Enterprise And Government and Business customers is that clients are saying that their ability to access applications quicker makes a difference to their business and when they start to equate time savings and doing calculations around productivity it does become a return on investment."

Telstra Business Group Managing Director Deena Shiff also stated that the efforts aren't as sudden as it might seem, having feedback of many users as the base.


=== Technology ===
Telstra GSM and NextG mobile phone tower
Previous modems were able to reach peak speed 21Mbps, with real life speeds ranging from 0.5Mbps to 8 Mbps. The theoretically expected maximum of the new technology is 42Mbps with user speeds varying between 1.1 and 20 Mbps. The new speed is twice as fast. This is caused by that the dual-carrier "Evolved High-Speed Packet Access" technology allows networks to send and receive wireless data using two channels simultaneously. This technology can be deployed on Next G networks. Telstra switched to them in February, thus making the switch to HSPA possible now.

=== Election campaign ===
Tony Abbott in 2010.
Telstra delayed the implementation of the new technology until elections end. This decision was intended to avoid wrong interpretation of them by . Coalition's claims include that wireless networks can be an alternative to the  "''fibre-to-the-home''" proposal to introduce more expensive wired Internet. The announcement of the new technology, initially planned on August 25, was delayed, with Telstra spokesman Craig Middleton explaining, "We just didn't want to feel like we were influencing the telecommunications debate."

The political parties have different plans on development and funds on the Internet. The Labor party aims to spend AUD 43 billion to bring 1 Gbps wired Internet nationwide, and the Coalition plans to spend AUD 6 billion to introduce a variety of improvements including upgrade of existing copper Internet as well as expansion of wireless Internet to support 12Mbps. Opposition leader Tony Abbott has said in the past that Australians shouldn’t assume wireless technologies won’t ever be comparable to fixed-line technology. Telstra's upgrade shows that wireless broadband is reaching the 100 Mbps minimum speeds promised by Labor's national broadband network.

=== Distribution ===
A NextG Telstra wireless USB modem
Telstra has only 2000 devices which support the new technology. This is why the opportunity to try it out is being given only to the Business plan customers, and they receive it for the same price as they were paying for the previous NextG plan. Since October 5, the device will be available for sale, with the Business customers able to buy it with 75% discount and a prepaid data allowance. The upgrade is expected to cover roughly 50% of the population. This is happening at the same time as one of Telstra's competitors  is doubling data download quotas on mobile cap plans.

As some testing showed, real life download speeds reached only about the half of the maximum. Telstra executive director of wireless Mike Wright explained that the predicted figures were the estimates, with real life speeds lower due to interfering environmental conditions: "It's possible to achieve better than the typical user speed claims, but those claims occur in the ideal network environment with good signal quality. When you're out on the streets you get a lot of variation where the network is subject to signal quality, your location and the network load."