Telstra acquired another 338,000 contract mobile phone customers and 98 million prepaid mobile users in the last six months, along with 436,000 mobile broadband customers. It now has 6.4 million contract mobile customers, 3.3 million prepaid customers and 2.7 million mobile broadband users. That’s good news for Telstra shareholders, but it underlines a dilemma for consumers and the company: if Telstra doesn’t constantly keep installing new network equipment, speeds for everyone are going to keep getting slower over time.
Telstra certainly has an aggressive rollout policy, most evident recently in its rollout of LTE-based services with 4G branding. We’ve seen impressive results with those services, both on mobile broadband and the HTC Velocity handset. But both those tests were conducted when the services were new and had just a handful of subscribers. As more people sign up, the performance invariably slows, because there is only so much bandwidth to go around. We saw that with the dual-channel Ultimate services, and we’ll see that with LTE as well. With 100,000 4G dongles already sold, it might not take very long.
As long as successor networks keep getting lined up and coverage on existing services is enhanced, there shouldn’t be a major performance hit. But it’s always worth remembering: the mobile broadband speed you get today may not be the mobile broadband speed you get tomorrow. In that respect, fixed lines still have major advantages.
Republished from Lifehacker
Dudefella
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 1:03 PMI signed up to Telstra from Optus about 12 months ago because I was fed up with Optus’ non-existent 3G internet. Being on Telstra then was magnificent, it was fast and 100% reliable. It’s generally tolerable nowadays except at peak periods (ie, between 5pm and 10pm), where it is as bad as Optus was. They’ve clearly signed too many people without adding capacity.
Sicarius123
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 4:10 PMThat’s exactly what happened when I joined Optus at the iPhone 3G-S launch.
Was all roses for 2-3 months, then it just got slower and slower, with more and more call dropouts.
Moved to Telstra about a year and a half ago, and even if the net isn’t as blazingly fast as it was, at least I don’t have call issues.
Dave
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 1:09 PM98 Million pre paid users… wow thats a lot more than the population of the Country lol
Nicholas
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 5:14 PMWe love Telstra thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis much.
Will
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 10:15 AMExaclty my thinking….wtf? What is the source of these numbers anyway?
MotorMouth
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 1:09 PM“98 million prepaid mobile users” in a country of 23 million people? Wow!
wsDK_II
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 1:42 PMdid you get your 20 free SIMs in the mail the other week?
James
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 2:31 PMNO :( Sad Panda
Brandon W
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 1:24 PMYou make a good point Angus; Telstra is already operating dual-carrier HDSPA @ 42Mbps (theoretical maximum) which is the current limit that HSPA can support. It’s either smaller cells sizes with more 3G base-stations, or move more aggressively to LTE in the 1800 MHz band for Telstra. I think all the telcos’s are waiting until the digital divined spectrum is made available in the 700 MHz and 2500 MHz band; then we’ll see…
Matt
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 1:48 PM(Telstra is already operating dual-carrier HDSPA @ 42Mbps (theoretical maximum) – Brandon W
As the article points out, there are so many people using this now, I am lucky to get an average of 1.5Mbits/s download on HDSPA, Telstra vs Optus 3G speeds are now the same (Optus sometimes faster where I live). It will take no time for the LTE network to slow to a crawl too unless they upgrade. This is against the will of the shareholder however.
DarthDVD
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 2:06 PMwill of the shareholder be dammed… if the consumer cant get what they want. they put their money somewhere else… and then the shareholder will be demanding why they didnt expand.
Antonia
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 2:47 PMI hope that the people who still believe that wireless is a better way to go than an NBN read this article.
awallafashagba
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 4:25 PMhmmm …..
AZ
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 12:46 AMWireless and the NBN are mutually exclusive… I can’ t plug my phone into some piece of fibre while I am sitting in a pub.
Ollie
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 4:34 PMNinety. Eight. Million. Prepaid… I call bullsh!t on that one.
2012 estimated population of 22,826,318 people… with a couple of other major carriers in the game…
AZ
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 12:43 AMUnfortunately, many people post comments here without knowledge and/or consideration of the laws of physics. Spectrum can only carry so many signals,. more people == slower. It evolves because that’s evolution, you call that an ‘aggressive rollout stragegy” but I call it evolution. This is why it will keep chaging and why people will keep signing up. I refuse to pay for Telstra but i can see why so many do.
david
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 8:48 AMIt really is great to have a world class telco like Telstra. They went ahead and started rolling out LTE when they already had the fastest 3g network in town.
Other carriers are only just announcing their LTE services, but the fact is it’s available now with Telstra.
If they continue to provide this sort of service I will be sticking around for the long term.
At the end of my next contract 23 months. I will no longer be using voice calls. My phone will be running data only, and Telstra is the only telco who can provide that sort of confidence.
jeremy
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 5:06 PMre some comments about “max capacity” and “laws of physics”, well yes but you are not accounting for some key features of advanced base stations, namely – advanced sectorisation (many beams, basically) and beam steering/shaping. Not to mention use of microcells, which UMTS makes a lot easier. There is lots of room, and telstra is pretty good at radio network planning. no need for panic just yet.