Piggybacks In The Fast Lane
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday August 6, 2007
Virgin's new broadband package is a triple threat to Telstra landlines. David Flynn reports.
Pyrmont. East Ryde. The northern beaches. They're just some of the areas in Sydney's sprawl of broadband black spots where many residents are unable to enjoy the high-speed internet most of Sydney takes for granted. In some cases, the homes of the have-nots are too far from the local exchange - even a five-kilometre journey can choke the digital signals that turn copper phone line into a broadband pipeline. In other instances, the local lines were long ago configured by Telstra to support more phone numbers for an increasing population, but at the cost of disabling any future upgrade to broadband.The result is the same: homes stuck on dial-up access, scraping by with a steam-powered 50 kilobits a second in a world of 10,000Kbps (10Mbps) connections. At such a snail's pace, many websites designed for full-throttle ADSL connections are almost unusable.Companies such as iBurst and Unwired have a wireless alternative to fixed-line broadband and even Telstra sells a desktop modem that taps into its Next G mobile phone network.Now the landline has been dealt a further blow from Virgin's launch of a wireless broadband service that piggybacks onto Optus's high-speed 3G mobile network to deliver not just broadband internet but also a "virtual" landline with free calls nationwide for $60 a month. Customers are given a standard phone number issued from the local exchange or can bring their existing number over at no charge, with their telephone plugging into the supplied multi-purpose wireless modem. Coverage is limited to the span of Optus's enhanced 3G "wireless broadband" network, but this takes in most of Sydney, Canberra and the Central Coast. Virgin has an address-based signal checker at virginbroadband.com.au/coverage and a 30-day money-back trial of the service to ensure you're not in a low-signal or no-signal zone. It's a potent triple threat to Telstra. Virgin Broadband customers can ditch their landline and the monthly line-rental levy Telstra collects regardless of who your internet service provider is. The typical $30 line-rental fee, which doesn't include any calls or internet access, gets you halfway towards Virgin broadband's internet-and-free-calls combo.Virgin's wireless system will appeal to renters who don't want to shell out for landline connection costs each time they move - a service for which Telstra charges between $59 and $299.At the same time, Virgin is set to deliver wireless internet into those broadband black spots at lower prices and with higher downloads than Telstra's equivalent Next G service. In fact, Virgin even betters many BigPond ADSL plans in price and its lack of excess-usage fees.The deal is undeniably sweet. For $60 a month on a 24-month contract, customers get 4GB of downloads at a peak speed of 700Kbps and a reliable average of about 512Kbps. File-sharing activities such as BitTorrent are automatically wound back to a 64Kbps trickle in order to reduce network congestion. Once past the 4GB mark, the connection drops to 128Kbps rather than sting you with excess usage fees.Our tests from an apartment on the lower North Shore found that even with a medium-level signal strength, online speed averaged 550Kbps and peaked at 680Kbps (with uploads a steady 300Kbps) during late evenings, when the local 3G base station was shared among fewer users. We hooked up our regular telephone handset and found call quality was excellent. The hardware, which is included in the bundle, is a stylish white bookend-sized box that plucks a 3G signal out of the air. In addition to standard jacks for a telephone and computer internet connection, it includes a Wi-Fi transmitter so the broadband connection can be shared around the house. On top of the free untimed calls to standard landlines nationwide and Virgin Mobile numbers, calls to other mobile networks are 45c a minute. International numbers cost 45c to $1.80 a minute depending on the destination.
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald