Is rolling out mobile broadband cheaper?

The installation of a mobile phone mast in the middle of towns makes the recouping of capital costs much quicker even when ensuring that it is kept up to date with the latest standards in hardware, but things are very different when placing them in rural villages with only a few hundred homes in range of the cell tower.

It has been suggested that a capital expenditure of 1000 euro per subscriber will be required, according the Omnitel, the Finish research company. The cost of a backhaul upgrade from the cell towers as people begin using their mobile broadband for things other than online shopping and buying a couple of music tracks and the hardware upgrades that will be required in order to support speed increases as they become available has been taken into account.

It also appears that fixed-line broadband will still offer many advantages for users who use large amounts of bandwidth every month with the tasks they perform, especially as usage figures that some mobile broadband users may exceed has been suggested as being 10GB. You will normally find that 3GB worth of data usage will cost between £10 and £15 over a mobile connection, whereas you will often get 10 to 20GB or even more with cable and ADSL, plus the re-sampling of images down to a lower level of quality is something you don’t have to put up with when using fixed line broadband.

The cost of providing fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) across the UK has been estimated at around £29 billion, which would equate to around £1100 (1350 euro) per household as there are around 25 million homes throughout the country. The idea that several billion has already been spent in order to reach a national coverage of 80 percent makes mobile broadband all the more attractive as it doesn’t mean starting fresh, and it appears that spending more money is something that mobile providers are happy to do.

Whether the consideration being made by decision makers is merely based around the short term benefits of technology that will satisfy a USO in order to meet a promise made by politicians, or whether something that will last for many decades to come is being looked into is currently the main issue in the arena for next generation broadband.