Wobbles and Bazz.

You might like to update your technological outlook to the 21st century. What you can get now from one tower is 10 to 20 x the data transfer rate you could get even 5 years ago.

Our offices at work are all wifi, as this is cheaper than cabling, and we are getting speeds of greater than 100Mb/s with hundreds of users. Not everyone is downloading data at once.

Shadow Minister;
Thats right data speeds are higher.
However those data rate increases are not confined to mobile phones.
I was not talking about data rate anyway, but network architecture.

The mobile phone network services a dense area of low power
transmitters and receivers with miniature antennae.

In remote area internet we are talking about high powered
transmitters (relatively) and high gain antenna at the customer site
with, say for argument sake, a 25 watt transmitter.
The mountain top transmitters would be of the order of hundreds of
watts to several thousand watts depending on terrain and the size of
the service area of that transmitter and the required signal to noise ratio.
All this gear is available off the shelf now.

As you can see this is nothing like the wifi office application to
which you referred.
If the NBN is not considering something like this I just cannot see
it being a success or it will cost as much as the fibre.

It's a little off-topic, individual. But let's take a closer look.

>>Pericles, What I would like to have explained by service providers is why can people in Bangladesh, India & Indonesia afford to call Australia without much concern of cost yet to call these countries from Australia is almost prohibitive on my slightly above average wage ?<<

I've found some for you.

This one's $0.08c a minute, after a $0.25c flagfall. So you can get a ten minute call to Bangladesh for a dollar. A touch more expensive for Indonesia.

http://freesim.lebara-mobile.com.au/aus-free-sim/?tmcampid=54&tmad=c&tmplaceref=GGL_0020338

There's also a company offering free calls to Bangladesh.

http://www.cherrycall.com.au/asia/phone-bangladesh.jsp

I wonder how they pull that trick.

Altogether not what I'd describe as "prohibitive", individual.

Particularly for someone like me, who can recall, most vividly, the "pound a minute" it used to cost to call Australia.

And that was when the pound was actually worth something...

Bazz,

Things have changed since your ham radio days.

The frequencies are much higher, where the noise is lower, while being mostly line of sight, the power requirements are far lower.

Sorry, your comment makes no sense to me.

>Things have changed since your ham radio days.
Anyway my days are current.
No, things havn't changed, are you suggesting that 2.4 gig could be
used for that sort of service ?

The signals would be lost in the trees every time it rained.
I am afraid you have been mesmerised by wifi.
Next you will be telling me that BPL is a goer.

If you want to cover a greater area more power is going to be needed.
In fact a great deal more power. How else are you going to cover an
area say 75 km+ in radius with perhaps a couple of hundred users ?
By putting up mobile towers every few of KMs ? One for every customer
all connected by fibre I presume.

Really !

Bazz with a couple of hundred people, you are not looking for fibre connected towers, only repeaters.

The reception at the distant houses is greatly enhanced with directional antennae which cost very little.