periphery

This page considers the telecommunications infrastructure in Australia.

It covers -

• introduction
• beyond the kerb
• voice over fixed-line
• mobiles, wireless data and BPL
• nodes

     introduction

Australia's telecommunications infrastructure reflects the nation's geography, history and markets. By the mid-1990s that infrastructure provided robust delivery of voice traffic to organisations and domestic consumers across Australia. It has, however, struggled to keep pace with increasing demand for delivery of data, with consequent questions about competition, divides, investment and security.

     beyond the kerb

[under development]

     voice over fixed-line

By 2000 Australia boasted a national 96.8% household penetration rate for fixed-line phones, with suggestions that penetration decreased marginally in the following years as consumers relied on mobile phones. Penetration rates varied across Australia, from 98.3% in the ACT to 91.4% in urban areas of the Northern Territory and 76% in some remote areas. At that time Telstra accounted for 10.24 million access lines and Optus for some 400,000 access lines.

The universal service obligation (USO) requires Telstra to "ensure that payphones are reasonably accessible to all people in Australia on an equitable basis". The ACA has issued a succession of reports on Telstra’s performance in meeting that obligation.

Competition in the provision of payphones was introduced in 1989. By 2003 over half the payphones in operation were customer operated payphones, ie operated by entities other than Telstra such as retailers and entities such as TriTel and Optus that operate and supply their own payphones.

In 2001-02 the estimated number of payphones in Australia was 71,635, of which 33,778 were operated by Telstra. 69% of Telstra payphones were located in urban areas (communities of greater than 10,000 people), 27% in rural areas and 4% in remote areas. 36% of the population reported having used a payphone in 1999-2000, down from 47% in 1998-99. Much of the decline is arguably due to uptake of mobile phones: 40% of respondents in a 2000 government survey reporting less payphone use because of access to a mobile; 23% reported less use of the domestic fixed-line phone.

     mobiles, wireless data and BPL

Australia is following Scandinavia in heading towards an environment where there is one mobile phone per head of population and uptake of broadband results in an overall decline in the number of fixed line connections.

The Australian mobile phone market grew by around one million new subscribers per year from 1994 (with peak growth in 1995, when around two million subscribers joined). In 2000 the number of mobile phone accounts had reached 8.5 million, compared to around 10.6 million fixed lines in use at that time as "main lines" (with upwards of a further 11 million lines in use). By December 2002 that had increased to 12.5 million mobile phone subscriptions, with 72% of all households having access to a mobile. The ITU suggests that at that time there were around 23 million subscribers in Australia, with some subscribers having multiple accounts and using several telephone service providers.

Particular mobile service providers have recently moved to commoditise parts of their infrastructure. In 2001 for example Vodafone Australia sold 669 wireless communications towers to Crown Castle Australia for US$130 million. Crown Castle - owned by the US Crown Castle group and New Zealand-based investor Jump Capital - is now Australia's largest independent tower operator with almost 1,400 towers in Australia and a presence in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. In 2000 it purchased 700 wireless towers from Optus for US$135 million.

Wireless internet access has been recurrently touted as a solution for 'last mile' connectivity in suburban Australia. In practice it has attracted most attention within a handful of metropolitan areas (in particular central business districts) and venues that attract consumers willing to pay a premium for secure access (eg airports).

As at the beginning of 2004 it is estimated that there were around 15 providers, sharing some $500,000 revenue for three hundred 802.11-based wireless internet access "primary locations (often encompassing multiple wireless hotspots)" across Australia. Users often had multiple subscriptions because of the lack of ubiquitous roaming.

Detailed notes about wireless access in Australia and New Zealand are here.

Enthusiasts and vendors have hyped broadband over powerline (BPL) - aka digital powerline communication (PLC) - for voice and other traffic to the home or within the home. Regulatory and commercial issues of that technology are discussed in a supplementary note elsewhere on this site.

     nodes

We have highlighted the role of internet service providers (ISPs) and content hosts (ICHs) earlier in this profile.

The number of devices on the nodes is unknown and in practice in unknowable, as there are no reporting requirements for much equipment. Some data is collected by industry organisations, analysts and government bodies about devices imported into Australia and devices sold. That information however is indicative only: it identifies equipment entering the wholesale/retail distribution chain, rather than that in actual use and that taken out of service. Surveys have resulted in widely varying estimates of devices in use.

There is disagreement about the number of servers in use within Australia on the internet and intranets. Some sense can be gained from corporate reports of sales of high-end servers and reports, well-based or otherwise, about uptake of different server software.

As of 2002 the ABS estimates that 61% of all households had a personal computer; 46% accessed the internet from home. The ABS estimates that as of March 2003 there were 1,687 internet points of presence (down from 2,130 in the preceding year) and 857,470 access lines. The number of subscribers using Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) was 209,000, of 5.1 million subscribers overall.

There is ongoing disagreement about corporate and domestic use of facsimile machines. One 2000 federal study suggested that around 20% of households use fax machines, inconsistent with claims in research for the Regional Telecommunications Inquiry that residential use of fax averages 11% (22% in remote households, 13% in regional rural households, associated with agricultural home offices).

At that time an estimated 67% of SMEs used fax, a figure that is likely to have subsequently significantly declined as those enterprises shift to email. DCITA argues that 20-30% of all Australian international calls are fax transmissions and that up to five billion pages are faxed in Australia each year.




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