Senator Conroy in all his wisdom (or lack thereof) has recently claimed the government’s plan to invest in the OPEL network, with a $958 million government grant is not going to fulfill the proposed 99% coverage of the nation.
1. OPEL never committed to that level of coverage. That was a Coonan announcement, and wasn’t based off OPEL coverage only, with the news that FTTN and other services will also be available.
2. The coverage can’t be measured by anybody at all yet, because they have no idea the equipment being used, the power used on the transmitter, the frequency planned to be used, the version of WiMAX proposed to be used, how WiMAX will work in the specific areas.
So, what you get from the ALP is a rushed announcement trying to show something that it cannot prove anyway.
What they’ve done is used topographics to place predicted coverage on the electorate maps, trying to take into account the surface available.
They have no idea how high a tower is going to be built, or any enhancements with regard to angle that OPEL might do to create better coverage, or how they might deploy the network.
They are working off assumptions, such as 4W EIRP and 5.8Ghz.
Those are never set in concrete and the graphs offered by the ALP are really piss poor attempts at trying to shame out the OPEL effort.
We’ll obviously be able to benchmark OPEL when the develop, tweak and have the network in a complete state.
Benchmarking with nothing there is like benchmarking a computer system with no motherboard, CPU or RAM.
You simply can’t do it.
Enjoy!