Dan Warne15 April 2008, 10:51 AM
Answering a question at a conference this morning, Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo was cool about whether Australia would get the iPhone through Telstra.
“I have a question for you: when can I get my iPhone?” asked David Havyatt, the chairman of the CommsDay Summit 2008 in Sydney.
Trujillo, quite obviously not keen on answering the question directly, said, Telstra already had a good lineup of 3G devices and that “it’s all about enabling the things you want to do, not what some other company wants you to do.”
The Telstra chief was delivering a presentation to the communication industry, analysts and journalists about “the gigabit era” and how Telstra was delivering on it.
Trujillo ran through many of the challenges that Telstra had faced in rolling out its Next G network – one of them being the difficulty Telstra had faced in getting handset manufacturers to put a BigPond button front and centre on all their phones – something that Apple would be unlikely to agree to ship on an iPhone out-of-the-box.
The megabits are not enough
Sol Trujillo spoke at length about how Australia would have bandwidth requirements of 50 or 100 megabits per household sooner, rather than later.
He said the typical bandwidth into a home – a few megabits – doesn’t go far when split among 4.5 users (the average number of people in each Australian household), even with today’s applications – something that’s obvious to anyone that suffered through the years where Telstra could have offered 8Mbit/s to every household but instead artificially limited it to 1.5Mbit/s for marketing purposes.
Trujillo said consumer demand for internet video was rapidly increasing, with ‘log linear’ growth rates. He gave the example that in 2001, Telstra’s total IP network traffic per month was 200 terabytes. Five years later, it was 8000 terabytes, and just 15 months later, Telstra was moving 18,000 terabytes a single month – a 90 fold increase in seven years. He said this trend showed no sign of slowing, and was in fact accelerating quickly.
Increasingly, consumers would want video communication,,Trujillo said. “All of us are moving into this notion that says “I’d like to have a video conversation with you if I can’t have a real-time, in real-space conversation with you,” he said.
However, in answer to a question from APC about whether Telstra planned to offer symmetric internet links – important because good quality video communication needs a fast link in both directions -- Trujillo was circumspect.
“I don’t know – I will be frank with you,” he said. “Everything for me is about market demand, and so far if you look at the asymmetry that we have and the more recent example of wireless – we have a network that operates at 14.4 megabits per second but the ability to upload at 1.9. We’re seeing uptake and use [of the faster upstream] but not overwhelming yet. “
“My view is that there will be a significiant requirement, but it’s about development of markets and people understanding that you really can have a virtual network wherever you go.
“But we have to also change and allow for consumer behaviour and when I say consumer, I mean people in their businesses too – to evolve with us. I think we can deliver very well fully symmetric or a continued asymmetry, or with enough capabilities to service our design and architecture today,” he concluded.
Mistakes, we made a few…
During his talk, Sol Trujillo admitted Telstra had “learned some things” along the way while rolling out its Next G network.
“Our Next G network is the best example of moving fast and creating a new platform that was integrated. Did we learn some things along the way? Absolutely. It was about infrastructure, but it was also about … chipsets, handsets, the delivery system within our stores, the training, and the software in the devices. It’s even to do with where antennas are located in handsets,” he said, referring to Telstra’s Next G coverage woes – real and perceived.