Group items tagged

Aug 2009,

"4.4 Rural coverage and take-Up With a population density almost an order of magnitude greater than Scotland's, South Korea does not provide many lessons in rural coverage. However, Australia does. Its overall density is 1/20th Scotland's with vast tracks of land populated by less than one person per ten square kilometers and in some cases per hundred square kilometers. As a result Australia has not been able to escape the urban-rural digital divide, which, as already noted, is embodied in its two-track fast broadband deployment strategy. A large 93% of the population will have access to 100 Mbps service, according to the NBN plan, while the remaining 7%--in rural and remote areas-is being promised up to 12 Mbps only.[6]NBN simply assumes that rural and remote areas do not justify FTTH and that they will be served by fixed wireless and satellite technologies. On the mobile side, on the other hand, Australia has relied on competition between its mobile operators (reduced to three after a consolidation) to extend service beyond urban areas. This has generally produced limited results. Subsidies for better coverage have been applied at the state level, however, with Western Australia being an instructive example. Specifically, the Western Australia government conducted a reverse auction tender to improve mobile coverage in selected areas, which resulted in Telstra, the main incumbent operator, securing A$39.2 million in government aid (on top of committing A$106 million of its own funds) for this purpose. Like Australia, Sweden has large unpopulated areas to serve, yet cannot rely on new-generation satellites, which do not reach these areas. Initially Sweden relied on HSPA mobile coverage but it has recently added a national coverage requirement in the context of its 4G (LTE) spectrum auction. Specifically, the Swedish regulator identified rural homes and businesses that need to be covered, requiring 75% of the indicated homes and businesses to be covered by Decemb