MELBOURNE, Australia-Most of the major telecommunications carriers to have successfully bid at the recent Australian 2 GHz spectrum auctions plan to adopt wideband-CDMA (W-CDMA) for third-generation (3G) services.
Cable & Wireless Optus and Vodafone operate GSM digital mobile services; Hutchison has a CDMA network. All three carriers have committed to deploying W-CDMA networks. Australia’s largest telco, Telstra, however, is holding off on committing to a technology. Telstra runs both GSM and CDMA mobile services.
“We’re looking at developments internationally in both consumer demand and the technology side,” said Tim Scott, a public affairs manager for the company’s mobiles division, Telstra OnAir. Only Optus has, to date, announced its infrastructure vendor, Nokia.
Hutchison, though, has indicated that it will reveal its choice of vendor soon. Optus has already teamed with Nokia to form a “FutureLab” to research and develop 3G applications.
“It allows new developments to come in and be tested in a mobile environment,” said Finola Thompson, Optus’ director of mobile Internet and data.
Optus expects to spend A$900 million (US$472 million) with Nokia on second-generation (2G) and 3G equipment. Spectrum will not be cleared and available for 3G mobile services until October next year. Carriers are confident they can begin trials as early as the end of the year.
Said Thompson: “We expect to have a limited 3G network capability by the end of this year and some 50 sites up and running.”
It is unlikely, though, Australia will have commercial services much before 2003. Aware of past overzealous forecasts, Peter Bolger, Vodafone’s director of strategy and business development, more conservatively predicted the company will not be ready to commercially fly with 3G services until early 2004.
“As far as a commercial service, we are a little more skeptical than the general vendor community,” Bolger said. “If you look back over WAP and GPRS, by the time you could actually commercially launch those things, it was significantly later than some of the hype that was being built up around them. We expect in a technology sense, W-CDMA would probably begin around 2004.”
In fact, Optus, Telstra and Vodafone have all recently entered the 2.5-generation (2.5G) space, offering packet-switched GPRS products over GSM. Optus is already looking to extend the 2.5G test bed created in its FutureLab to facilitate application development for 3G. Telstra wants to assess the success of 2.5G first.
“We’re not going to jump into 3G until there is a well-established business case for us to do that,” Telstra’s Scott said. “A lot of services and applications we’re looking to provide in a 3G environment, you can also provide in a 2.5G environment. We want to get our customers comfortable with that technology first.”
Telstra uses Ericsson and Nortel as its GPRS suppliers. Vodafone uses Ericsson.
Telstra is also planning further trials of 1XRTT this year, the 2.5G evolutionary technology to CDMA, after conducting its first live test last August.
Financial pressures are less likely to prove a burden in Australia as in other parts of the world, in particular some European countries. While carriers in places such as Britain and Germany paid more than A$1,000 (US$524) per head of population for 3G spectrum, Optus in Australia, for example, forked out just A$61 (US$32) per head of population. Further, spectrum in Europe will be used to provide capacity for voice as well as data, whereas in Australia, spectrum will be used almost exclusively for high-speed data services and mobile Internet. Also, carriers such as Vodafone and Hutchison, as part of global enterprises, will be able to closely monitor the progress of 3G as it is brought in, particularly through their European operations.
Hutchison and Telecom New Zealand also announced in May that they would commit A$1 billion (US$524.5 million) in equity to a jointly owned company, Hutchison 3G Australia, to secure footholds in the 3G market when it arrives.
“Our marketing team is together in terms of the global activities that are working on content, all the different applications and platforms for terminals. Everything is being looked at on a global perspective in terms of purchasing. Hutchison Whampoa is a global operator, and we are a part of that,” said Lynette Innes, Hutchison’s director of corporate communications.
