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Communications minister Paul Fletcher has indicated that he will not restart the stalled spectrum reform process until he is satisfied that the proposed new regime will provide superior benefits to the system it replaces.

A new Radiocommunications Act has been some five years in the making but its progress stalled in the last parliament under former comms minister Mitch Fifield.

In an interview with CommsDay, Fletcher said that while he understands there is an “appetite” for change, he needs to be satisfied that the proposed new law delivers a “public policy prize” before he green lights it for introduction into parliament.

“I guess what I want to be satisfied of is, what are the benefits we’re going to get from the changes that are proposed? How material are the claimed deficiencies in the present regime? And is there a public policy prize for making changes,” he told CommsDay. “I certainly don’t doubt that proposition that there are opportunities to update and improve the regime. The question in my mind is how wholesale the changes need to be. But, look, I don’t have a concluded view on that yet. I’m just starting to get some of my initial briefings on it.”

Work to revamp the 1992 Radiocommunications Act first began in 2014 when then minister Malcolm Turnbull asked the department and the Australian Communications and Media Authority to undertake a review of spectrum management. The government agreed to their recommendations the following year and an exposure draft for a new act was released in May 2017. But after a consultation period elicited a substantial degree of stakeholder concern about the fine print of the proposed legislation, the process stalled in what one departmental insider described as the “Canberra version of Hollywood development hell.”

“It’s been quite a torturous process,” Fletcher acknowledged.

“Essentially, I want to be satisfying myself that the bill makes tangible improvements to the current arrangements, so that we are committed to a reform process in relation to spectrum,” he explained. “In particular, I guess, the way that spectrum is allocated, but I think it’s important to start from a premise that in the broad, we’ve got a system that has served us reasonably well.”

“I think we can have a level of confidence that people will keep coming up with applications where we can make use of spectrum for economic and social good. That really needs to be the underlying consideration. What is our process, as set out in the legislation, for allocating spectrum, and then, again, to come to a more practical or prosaic level, looking at the kinds of spectrum licenses we have now— the apparatus license, the class license, the spectrum license—is that fit for purpose? Do we need more flexibility? And if so, what might different mechanisms look like?”

Fletcher said he hadn’t decided yet whether to hold another formal review into the reforms, saying it “was too early to say. That is to be determined.”

FULL STEAM AHEAD FOR RBS: Fletcher, however, was less equivocal on the also stalled Regional Broadband Scheme legislation, which creates a $7 a month superfast broadband levy which will fund the rural loss making activities of the NBN. Legislation for this was also released in 2017 but has yet to be passed by the parliament.

“We’re intending to proceed with that,” Fletcher affirmed.

“A lot of work’s been done on that. The basic policy logic of a cross-subsidy from broadband service in metro areas to regional and remote areas, that’s a direction the government’s committed to, so yes, we will be proceeding with that. They’ll be very much continuing as we talked about.”

“The whole structure of the NBN has been underpinned by seeking to solve the policy challenge that the Universal Service Obligation in the voice world was designed to address. And in the broadband world, the way we’ve addressed it is, rather than placing a statutory obligation on an existing provider within a funding mechanism linked to that, we’ve built a taxpayer funded network.”

Fletcher also played down hopes of more changes to the Universal Service Obligation on Telstra.

“There was a fairly careful look at the USO throughout most of 2018, and there’s a number of elements of it which are locked in in terms of the contract between Telstra and the government. And a set of cash flows to Telstra. So that’s locked in for quite some years.”

SingTel executives have portrayed a rosy picture of Optus’ enterprise and consumer businesses at a major investor day held in Singapore’s St Regis Hotel last week.

The day-long session incorporated presentations from the heads of SingTel’s various operating units in Thailand, India, Indonesia, the Philippines as well as Optus from Australia, represented by CEO Allen Lew.

Lew told investors and analysts that the addition of 454,000 postpaid additional subscribers last FY was the highest ever in the company’s history, while its $2.5b in EBITDA for the consumer business was also a record.

He also pointed to external validation for the company, saying it had ranked first in data experience in the P3 mobile survey. It had also ranked first in Opensignal’s 2019 survey of 4G availability.

“In FY20 we will continue to differentiate through our four pillars,” Lew told the session. “We go further to connect customers with exceptional network, value and service.”

SingTel’s group enterprise head Bill Chang outlined just how dominant the combined SingTel/Optus enterprise group is in the APAC market.

The group is no 1 for market share in both the APAC international IPVPN and international leased circuit markets. In IPVPN it has 21% of the market, way ahead of China Telecom on 7% and Orange on 6% while in leased circuits it has a 16% market share, ahead of PCCW on 11% and PLDT on 7%.

Overall the revenue mix of the group was transforming from legacy telco to ICT markets where it had a different set of competitors including IBM and Accenture.

Chang said the group’s vision was to be a “key enabler of smart cities and digital enterprise with deep capabilities.”

Around 17 years ago, back in December of 2002, I was fortunate enough to jag a media visit to witness the launch of the New Skies NSS-6 satellite from Kourou in French Guiana. It’s where the European Space Agency has its spaceport and where Arianespace does most of its launches from. There are a few standout memories for me, notably that the sound and feel of the launch is just as impressive as the visual aspect, and that it afforded a trip to Devil’s Island, where I could see the actual cell that held “Papillon”, the famous escapee who went on to write a best selling autobiographical novel of his experiences in the French penal colony.

While much of the rest of the experience has faded into memory, I’m always reminded of that time through a model of a truck carrying a replica Arianespace rocket that I picked up in a gift shop in downtown Kourou. I’ve nurtured that rocket memento across four continents and out of the grasping hands of two small boys who are now large teenagers. It’s one of the very few items I’ve held on to during the intervening 17 years and I’ve often wondered why I was particularly sentimental about that truck and rocket combination, which others would have passed off as a child’s toy. But after reading Alice Gorman’s book on space archaeology – Dr Space Junk vs The Universe – I now realise the behaviour wasn’t a strange as I suspected. As she notes, from the start of the Cold War people have been moulding everything from food and drink to toys and playparks into rockets to mark our fascination with space. These items are all part of the world views shaped by space technology and are among a range of things that space archaeologists, like Dr Gorman, can investigate.

Many Space & Satellite AU readers will be familiar with Gorman and her work, but for those that aren’t she is a trained archaeologist, with enough dirt under the finger nails at dig sites to earn her chops in the field. How she came to be one of the foremost experts in the burgeoning field of space archaeology sets the scene early in the book. It’s a fascinating story in its own right, but the short version is she had an epiphany on the balcony of an old Queenslander while nursing a beer and looking up at the stars (and satellites). And we can be thankful she did otherwise she might never have got to writing this fascinating account of Australia’s early space history and why it’s important to preserve our space heritage, both down on earth and up in the skies.

I like to consider myself reasonably knowledgeable on Australia’s early space endeavours, particularly the activities at Woomera, our role in tracking a whole range of space missions, and the media event that was the re-entry of Skylab into outback Australia. But there’s so much more and Gorman tells it in a way that relays the history but also pushes her narrative of the importance of preserving these events and technologies so that others can make sense of them in the future.

For example, I had no idea about the Dust Detector Experiment, part of wider scientific experiment that had been conceived by Australian scientist Brian O’Brien when he was professor of space science at Rice University in Houston, Texas. It went on a number of Apollo missions to the Moon in the 1960s and was still providing data until 1977. That tiny device allowed O’Brien and his research assistants to learn the impacts of dust on the Moon and continues to provide evidence that can guide how humans might build infrastructure on the Moon as well as how they can protect lunar heritage sites abraded by dust storms.

Another eye-opening account covers the efforts of a group of “backyard” amateur scientists in Melbourne in the 1960s who built their own satellite – Australis Oscar 5 – which is still circling the Earth almost 50 years since it was launched in 1970. Not only did they build the satellite, they also built their own tracking station on the roof of the old physics building at Melbourne Uni using old car parts, second-hand electric motors and pieces of an air-conditioning plant.

“When it is possible to study orbital hardware from space, these home-made satellites will stand out from the thousands of slick commercial, military and scientific satellites by their appearance. Project OSCAR initiated a tradition of volunteer, international space co-operation that continues to this day,” she notes in the book

Of course the Oscar 5 is just part of a growing stream of old satellites and assorted space junk that is filling our skies and will be visible from central Queensland verandahs on a clear night over a cold beer. It’s an issue that is starting to occupy the minds of governments around the world and Gorman also devotes space to the topic in the book. Her position is, not surprisingly, informed by her archaeologist training and she would like to see some of the more significant satellites remain in space if there is no risk involved. As she notes, heritage management is now a routine part of any terrestrial industry or development and the space industry should be no different.

“If we’re going to make decisions about what to destroy, let’s do it from an informed position. We need to know which objects do have cultural significance in orbit, from local, national and global perspectives. And we need to understand how their changing orbits may relate to collision risks.”

I’ve only scratched the surface of  Dr Space Junk vs The Universe, but if it sounds appealing in this brief synopsis, rest assured it’s a riveting read that is both expertly written and entertaining. There’s also a great “Conversations” interview with Dr Gorman by the ABC’s Richard Fidler somewhere out there in podcast-land if you want an appetiser. The book itself is available for purchase online at NewSouth Books for $29.99.

Geoff Long (this appears in Space & Satellite AU)

While debate continues around the potential threat of fixed-wireless substitution for NBN’s business case, Deutsche Telekom CTO Bruno Jacobfeuerborn has highlighted a way mobile might actually help the national network – suggesting there’s no technical reason NBN couldn’t explore a similar hybrid fixed-LTE access product to that which DT offers already.

DT first unveiled its hybrid ‘MagentaZuhaus’ offering in early 2015, with a tariff that would give consumers access to both its fixed-line networks and its LTE net. “We had a very good LTE network… and then we said ‘okay, we believe in fixed-mobile convergence’,” Jacobfeuerborn told CommsDay following his keynote at the Global Broadband Futures event in Sydney. “So we [looked into], if we had both networks, how we could utilise both to help each other, if one network was not fulfilling the customer demand…. [such as in] rural areas where we have ADSL at maybe 4, 5, 6Mbps, [ but the customers] wanted to see HD movies at 12Mbps.”

A number of carriers in Australia already offer hybrid modems that connect to the NBN but can fall back to an LTE connection in the event of an outage or a wait to connect. The more advanced solution used by DT bonds together fixed and mobile streams deeper in the network, although the home modems it uses are still set up to prefer fixed-line networks – in order to minimise traffic offload to the limited spectrum available on LTE. The idea is that, as well as providing a backup service should the fixed network be completely unavailable, the mobile network can also supply a capacity boost to reach a set level of service where fixed networks are congested or slow.

“[If a fixed connection only gives you] 6Mbps, and you need another 4Mbps, then we add the rest from the LTE network,” said Jacobfeuerborn. “We got really good feedback on that one; people said ‘oh it’s great now – and it doesn’t really matter for us where it comes from’.  Which shows, by the way, that people don’t care! They would like to have broadband… normal customers who got that [hybrid solution], where they had nothing before, were really happy.”

“Of course, you can use it wherever you are, but it makes no sense if you already have 100Mbps on fixed-line. You can do it but, to be honest, to add another 100Mbps on LTE – very, very seldom would you need another 100Mbps!” he continued. “I would say that [the customers] are people with less than 50Mbps. Mainly it’s ADSL customers who have around 16Mbps and below. But when we developed it, we said ‘let’s see how it goes’, and one of the business cases was immediately fulfilled – because people went ‘oh, I would like to have it!’

NBN APPLICATION: All of this raises the question of whether NBN could bond mobile or wireless access to fixed-line to help boost service to some of its own footprint. DT, of course, has the advantage of having both fixed and mobile infrastructure of its own, whereas NBN has no mobile network of its own – although it does, of course, have a reasonable amount of spectrum across quite a broad geographic expanse.

In any case, Jacobfeuerborn, does not see this as an insurmountable impediment, suggesting a whole agreement with one of the mobile carriers.

“NBN in Australia… could do an agreement with [mobile carriers] like Telstra to add capacity as another product,” he said. And he added that the process would not be too difficult from a technical perspective. “Of course, you will have another platform in your network, but it’s just a platform.”

Petroc Wilton

CommsDay is pleased to announce three more top additions to its speaker line-up for October’s Melbourne Congress.

The CEO of the world’s largest Wi-Fi operator, iPass, will give an exclusive presentation to delegates on the first day. Gary Griffiths runs an operator which through partnerships offers an incredible 60 million hotspots in 120 countries including over one million in Oceania. Griffiths will share the global iPass “software as a service” story with delegates.

Meanwhile, in a year of intense activity by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in the telecom arena the official at the coalface of it all will present to CommsDay on the same day. Michael Cosgrave is the executive general manager, infrastructure regulation division of the ACCC and has a 21 year involvement and inside perspective on where regulation and the market is heading.

Also, recent Ovum returnee David Kennedy will kick off proceedings on the second day. The Asia Pacific research analyst rejoined Ovum recently after a two year break. Previously he was with Ovum for ten years, the Department of Communications for six years and advised former Coalition senator Richard Alston for four years before that.