Entry No.130

IT Writers Awards

The year of 1992 was a crucial one for Australia's mobile telephony networks. Two new players, Vodafone and Optus, entered the market that year under licences that mandated the closure of the analog mobile network on January 1, 2000.

It was envisaged that Australia would be united under GSM, a digital mobile standard originally developed in Europe. Closing the analog network meant that all of the carriers operating in Australia, including newcomers, would have the opportunity to compete on a level playing field.

As it turned out, the 1992 decision was a two-edged sword. Urban Australians have reaped the benefits of competition, including lower prices and a proliferation of services, and our level of mobile penetration is now among the highest in the world. But there were few benefits for the inhabitants of rural and regional Australia, where the GSM system would prove to be inadequate.

GSM is a perfect system for densely populated, geographically compact land masses like Europe because it's an efficient manager of bandwidth. What this means is that more calls can be squeezed into the space that might otherwise be taken up by a single analog call. GSM's other advantage is that it lets a caller roam across Europe (or any other closely settled land mass), taking and receiving calls seamlessly.

Those strengths are balanced by what's seen as a major weakness: poor long-distance performance. In Europe there's never much of a distance between base stations, and so long-distance transmission power never becomes much of an issue. But transplant the same infrastructure to Australia and it's a different matter.

Analog is well suited to rural areas because it's powerful. A relatively small number of analog base stations can serve vast areas of land mass, and the call quality is very good. Where it falls down is in the areas of security and efficiency.

The old analog system was inherently insecure because anyone with a powerful frequency scanner could eavesdrop on the conversation ñ as Prince Charles, much to his embarrassment, discovered several years ago. It's also bandwidth inefficient, meaning that the amount of space the call takes up in the frequency spectrum is much larger than the space required by a compact digital signal.

Digital resolves the security problem by converting the call into a stream of bits and bytes, and then encrypting that stream while it's in transit.

There's no technological reason that GSM can't be used in rural areas, so long as the base stations are clustered reasonably close together. And that's where it runs into problems. GSM is a relatively expensive system to install, making the cost of replacing the analog base stations with a larger number of digital stations very high.

On the surface it appears that the previous federal government hadn't considered this issue, and it wasn't until Telstra ñ the primary supplier of telecommunications services to rural areas ñ announced that it would not offer equivalent digital coverage once analog was dismantled that the waste hit the wind tunnel.

This federal government made it a requirement of Telstra's licence that it provide a mobile system with coverage equivalent to that offered by the old analog system. The technology it hit on is called CDMA, a digital system that offers the same capabilities as GSM (such as security, bandwidth efficiency and the ability to carry data) with a range similar to analog using a similar number of base stations.

It was also decided that analog would undergo a phased shutdown, with some areas still operational after the January 1 deadline. This decision was made as a concession to Telstra, giving it the time it needed to roll out a sufficient number of CDMA base stations while still allowing rural residents equivalent coverage.

The question is, however, whether CDMA is really up to the job. When the shutdown was announced, the Australian Communications Authority (ACA) made maps showing the areas covered by analog service. These areas were larger than the areas that Telstra stated it covered due to a quirk in the analog technology. This quirk has been dubbed fortuitous coverage because it meant that some people were able to get service even if where they lived fell outside the official service areas. In a nutshell, the ACA's maps included these anomalous areas, while Telstra, provider of the service, didn't include them in its service maps.

Fortuitous coverage was possible for a number of reasons, including topography, or because sunspot activity was low or because the user happened to utter the right incantations when getting out of bed in the morning. It's not something that was designed into the analog system. It just worked out that way.

With the activation of CDMA, and the January 1 shutdown, fortuitous coverage has assumed centre stage in the ongoing debate over rural and regional communications services.

"There have probably been 20 or so complaints from people since January 1," said ACA analog closure public education program project manager Robyn Meikle. The complaints fall into two groups ñ those where the CDMA network hasn't been switched on yet, and those where they once got coverage from analog but appear not to under CDMA.

"These people are finding that they're not getting fortuitous coverage," she said, "however it's reasonable that they expect to get coverage that's similar to what they received in the past."

The ACA has a disputes resolution procedure in place, and has indicated that because the entire CDMA network is not yet switched on, it will watch developments closely.

That's not good enough for people living in rural areas, says NSW Farmers' Association Rural Affairs Committee chairman Mal Peters. "It's a joke when you see advertisements claiming that certain networks cover 96% of the population," he says. "Do you know where the 4% not covered live? In rural areas. It's not unreasonable, on the cusp of the 21st century, to expect to have access to communications wherever you are."

According to Peters, the CDMA system doesn't even match the coverage that was provided by the analog network, meaning that the areas previously falling into fortuitous coverage zones are now out of range of the new technology. "It appears that the CDMA system suddenly drops off outside the certain areas. There's no fortuitous coverage zones using CDMA."

Acting Prime Minister John Anderson waded into the debate, saying that although the CDMA network is experiencing teething problems, they could be solved by finessing and fine tuning. He also called on Telstra to allow customers to access analogue services in areas where CDMA has yet to be switched on. Telstra acquiesced, with the result that the analogue shutdown has temporarily been halted in its tracks until the CDMA and fortuitous coverage debate is resolved. More significant, however, was Anderson's support for the provision of satellite phone services to rural and regional areas as a way of getting around the CDMA coverage problem.

While Telstra has remained virtually silent on the topic of satellite phones, its CDMA product manager, Greg Young, is adamant that CDMA coverage is equal to, or better than the coverage offered by analog. ìThere have been criticisms by the NSW Farmers Association,î said Young in a statement. ìThese criticisms are based on anecdotal evidence.î

The key point in Telstraís self defence is Youngís statement that criticisms levelled by the Association for Protection of Users of Mobile Phones were based on surveys taken outside published coverage zones. In other words, these surveys were taken in areas that were prone to receiving fortuitous coverage. What this means is that fortuitous coverage is going to remain an issue for as long as thereís no universal, affordable satellite alternative. Australia is never going to have 100% of its land mass covered via GSM and CDMA phones. Itís just too expensive for the operators to do so.

CDMA is, inarguably, a better system than analog at a technical level. Whether it equals the coverage area previously offered by analog is a moot, if not redundant point, because some people in rural areas are always going to miss out on having access to effective communications. Unless, of course, a better system can be put in place.

ìItís amazing the way that mobile phones have changed things for people living in rural areas,î says Peters. ìRural business is time critical and dependent on good communications, just like other areas. Itís imperative that if we are to remain competitive with overseas producers, we have equitable access. And the only real answer to that is satellite phones.î

Several options loom on the horizon. Vodafone will launch a satellite system later this year called GlobalStar, while Motorola and others already have their Iridium system in place. Service and financial difficulties, however, have plagued Iridium, a system based on the use of an array of 24 Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites.

Satellite phones are also several orders of magnitude more expensive to purchase and to use. ìItís cost in excess of $600 million to get this far with CDMA,î Peters says. ìPerhaps that money would have been better directed towards providing affordable access to satellite systems.î

Satellite or no, one thing remains certain: rural dwellers have had to pay the price for a competitive environment in the cities and will continue to do so for some time to come.

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