If you take a trip to Silicon Valley you will notice that continuous public Wi-Fi is a way of life. Even the buses that shuttle employees from San Francisco to the Googleplex and beyond are equipped with serious high-speed internet connections. You would expect this incredible part of the world to be seriously connected. What I didn’t expect to find on a recent holiday is that most Australian cities are less connected through public Wi-Fi than Bali. Cities such as New Delhi have had better public Wi-Fi strategies than Sydney or Melbourne. Overseas visitors are stunned to learn that the closest public Wi-Fi access in Sydney’s CBD is McDonald’s.
This is all about to change with big developments afoot that will again reshape digital behaviour and the role of mobile devices for those on the move in Australia. In the last 12 months, iiNet announced an extension of its plans to bring free Wi-Fi to the entire Adelaide CBD with partners Internode, City of Adelaide and the SA Government. The Victorian Government has resolved, in an election year, to deliver free Wi-Fi to the Melbourne CBD. More spectacularly, Telstra has announced a $100 million plan to establish more than 2 million Wi-Fi hotspots across the country, starting in early 2015.
So why the change after years of patchy, slow and third-world public access? It all has to do with the next frontier of broadband access that has been quietly bubbling away in the NBN’s shadow and a sci-fi sounding project called the Digital Dividend. Explained simply, by switching to digital TV, re-tuning our TV’s and changing the settings on your Singstar wireless microphones, Australians opened up a huge swathe of available terrestrial bandwidth. A bandwidth that the federal government sold to Telstra, Optus and TPG for a cool $2 billion. Telstra alone invested $1.3 billion to underwrite its ambitious plan to deliver information to any device, anywhere.
If you believe Google’s Eric Schmidt “every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation up until 2003”. Much of the need for more data comes from those innocent little smartphones that more than 83% of Australians carry around. They are getting smarter, faster and hungrier – and consumers are loving it. Masters Home Improvement CEO Don Stallings famously commented that 50% of the hardware brand’s customers use their smartphones to price-check at the point of sale. Winners of the Digital Dividend auction have the right to provide and re-sell dramatically increased bandwidth that has clear passage around other terrestrial frequencies already well used.
Telstra is planning a killer blow to current data limits, with plans to allow consumers to take a portion of their home broadband data allowance to use over Telstra’s new 2 million hotspots. Certain functions such as watching video can be automatically switched to the Wi-Fi network to better manage booming device and data usage. This is a game changer to how consumers view Wi-Fi, data limits and what can be done while on the move.
What is clear is that we are still at the beginning of a digital transformation that has a considerable way to play out. The media landscape in Australia has a long path of transformation to come, and none of us will get out scot-free.
Lee Stephens is CEO of Switch Digital
This story first appeared in the AdNews print edition on the 19 September 2014.
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