A public-funded regional wireless broadband deployment would only overbuild existing commercial infrastructure, according to Telstra. While the federal government has said regional and rural areas will receive wireless broadband as part of the national broadband network rollout, Telstra Country Wide group managing director Brett Riley told CommsDay such deployments may be commercially unviable since mobile broadband networks already cover most of Australia’s far-flung regions.

The federal government is seeking to offer 12mbps wireless coverage to the 10% of the population outside the reach of fibre in its NBN plans. But while details of the wireless plans are as-yet unknown, Riley said ongoing upgrades to Telstra’s national HSPA network would mean high-speed wireless broadband will already cover the entire population. “We’ve already got [wireless coverage],” he said. “That’s what I’m missing in this whole discussion – at the moment Next G covers over 99% of the population, and there’ll always be a fraction that’ll only be satellite coverage, anything extra’s going to be overlay on an existing network.”

The Country Wide GMD said areas schedule for wireless coverage under the NBN were likely already covered by commercial networks. “I don’t understand where you’d deploy it – because to make it pay you’ve got to deploy it into areas [with] population, pretty much every town now that amounts up to 200 or so have definitely got coverage,” he said.

Riley even said that government subsidies for Next G users could be a viable alternative to a new wireless build. “It’s certainly one of the possibilities,” he said. “I’m not going to forecast what the government might put into place, but I think it would be a [credible] option to consider because in regional Australia there’s not enough people to support overbuild. That’s the key point. You really want to take the key networks that are out there now and make sure they’re fully utilised, of course. And there’s ways of doing that – I think the most efficient option for regional Australia is to fully use the networks that are out there and not try and overbuild them, just from a pragmatic point of view.”

But even if Telstra’s Next G network is capable of 21mbps speeds, it is still unlikely to meet the federal government’s NBN requirements. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has said wireless will deliver a minimum of 12mbps speeds to the ‘last 10%’, while a 21mbps Next G would likely offer average speeds below that mark. 3G rival Optus is currently increasing coverage from 96% to 98% of the population, while VHA now touches 94%.

Riley backed wireless as the right technology for the bush. “Wireless is definitely a good solution for a lot of regional and rural Australia, there’s no doubt about that. It’s working now, it’s a proven technology, it’s got a good footprint now,” he said. “We’re still rolling out [Next G] base stations, expanding the footprint and in-filling.”

“The other big thing we’re doing is upgrading the speed of a lot of those base stations... and to do that you’ve got to run fibre to them, you need the backhaul capacity. That’s not just an equipment or a software upgrade that is actually an infrastructure upgrade.”

Telstra is currently moving to have all of its Next G base stations capable of 21mbps speeds over the coming year. Some $70m will be invested to roll out fibre and Ethernet backhaul to base stations, with the bolstered backhaul capacity due to support the next iteration of 42mbps HSPA planned for 2010. 270 new or improved sites are scheduled for completion by June 2010, and over 84% of the population is now covered by Next G with Ethernet backhaul, or with at least 8Mbps backhaul using multiple E1s.