TV tower operator lobbies to host NBN
- 28 January, 2010 14:31
- Comments 5
Television towers should be a foundation of the National Broadband Network (NBN), according to tower operator, Broadcast Australia.
Broadcast Australia director of business development, Chris Jaeger, said he was lobbying the company responsible for the FTTH rollout, NBNco, in an effort to convince it that TV towers are ready to host wireless broadband connections.
“Ninety per cent of homes are going to be [connecting to] fibre and certainly that’ll be the case in cities and towns. What we’re looking at more are outlying areas,” Jaeger said. “Our sites can get out to the farms and remote communities and they are unique in terms of their location.
“These sites also have all the power and building infrastructure to allow these networks to be built on them.”
Jaeger said WiMax and LTE networks, such as those being built in Perth by VividWireless, would be the ideal solution when used in conjunction with satellite Internet, but stressed that Broadcast Australia would not seek to become an ISP or carrier in its own right.
“Using television technology, we get to between 97 to 98 per cent of the population,” he said. “What we could do is provide a fully managed service network, in partnership with others or by ourselves, to build and operate open networks that could be used by all carriers and service providers.
“There are lot of business models available… we’re open at the moment in our discussions with these parties as to what model works best and that’ll be determined based on how the technology can be planned and designed to provide the service.”
Broadcast Australia would look to have various solutions for consideration within the first half of this year, Jaeger said.
“Our aim is to be very cost-effective,” he said.
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Comments
Curtis B
It stands to reason that Broadcast Australia (and other TV tower operators across Australia) would be willing to co-operate with the NBN - the advent of digital television has seen the consolidation of transmission equipment in many areas, so there is a lot of mast space free.
This equipment is often situated perfectly on top of mountains/hills and some towers even have fibre to them already - making these great aggregation points for gigabit microwave wireless spurs to feed remoter communities.
Anonymous
Assuming the "digital dividend" pays off, a slice of the existing UHF TV spectrum plus the broadcast towers that pump it would have to be the most effective way of reaching regional areas.
Peter N
Is this possibly because Broadcast Australia stands to make alot of money if they did? Despite the fact that it's only going to be at WiMax speeds which is still far from the speeds of a fiber optic network. And, could be done from cellular towers alot easier with significantly less radio power. Maybe for those small towns which the typography would favour it but it is by all means not the answer for the general problem of delivering a high speed bidirectional network.
Anonymous
Not Technically Feasible
I cant see how this is technically feasible. The problem will be one of capacity. "Broadcast" sites are the bane of cellular operators networks today where they have been used because they offer only one cell for each sector they point drasticly limiting their capacity expansion opportunities.
Capacity on any wireless branch of the NBN will only be achieved by sticking to a cellular network design where a single spectrum access channel can be multiplied by the number of geographic cells that it is used over. Broadcast sites dont just serve 10-100 users - they serve thousands even in sparsely populated areas. It would be an NBN at snails pace if this were to be adopted.....
elliott11
Worth investigation
Surely this makes economic sense, assuming it is technically possible. Rather than throwing up hundreds of individual cells, centralised distribution like this can only save money. This is of course assuming the bandwidth available to these towers is adequate.
As another user mentioned, these television towers service thousands, even in remote areas. With the kind of speeds suggested by the government you are talking a massive volume of bandwidth needing to be available to these towers. Having said this, considering the job the Victorian government did wiring fibre to pretty much every Victorian state school I suspect bandwidth requirements could be adequately managed.
This is certainly something that should be at least considered by NBNco, so long as it is thoroughly investigated and tested beforehand so it does not turn out unfeasible and end up a massive cash pit for government money. As for the benefits for Broadcast Australia, someone has to make money out of these things, and do the government it simply depends what is going to give best return on investment.
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