Chorus pushes for national 5G strategy
The next generation of mobile telephony, known as 5G, should be built using the same government policy approach that supports the nationwide rollout of Ultra-Fast Broadband to create a shared, regulated backbone, says Chorus chief executive Kate McKenzie.
“We’ve been saying that when you get into the 5G world, there’s a pretty strong argument that we should be thinking about using the same model we’ve used for the fibre infrastructure,” she told BusinessDesk in an interview.
“In a 5G world, the amount of capital that’s going to have to be spent to build out those networks for a country of this size and this population, with small cells every couple of hundred metres — if three people (the current main mobile operators Spark, Vodafone and Two Degrees) do that, that’s insane.
“That’s just going sustainable,” she said.
5G technology will involve placing thousands of closely spaced cell sites around the country to transmit data from the millions of internetconnected sensors that are starting to control machines, automated systems and gather data as the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) revolutionises efficiency and knowledge-gathering in to be not a host of areas from urban planning to agriculture.
Leaving 5G infrastructure to the market risked “the country being left behind” because no mobile network operator would make the investment.
However, she was finding widespread sympathy for the shared approach to 5G infrastructure.
“There’s a certain sort of logic to it. People sort of go ‘I don’t know exactly what that looks like but actually, it is a sensible thing to talk about’,” said the former Telstra executive, who adds New Zealand is far ahead of Australia for broadband speeds and consumer packages.
Chorus was testing business models for an IoT future where the company would remain a commoditised telecommunications platform provider for the “gazillion ways” that IoT applications could emerge.
It was too soon to say whether such activity could be a material earnings contributor.
Chorus shares traded at $4.04, up 1.4 per cent, today and are stable, up just 0.4 per cent for the year.
— The New Zealand dollar followed its Australian counterpart lower on Thursday after trade figures across the Tasman weighed on the outlook for the antipodean commodity currencies.
The kiwi declined to US68.60c as at 5pm in Wellington from 68.76c at 8am and 68.96c Wednesday.
The Australian dollar fell 0.2 per cent in local trading after Australian Bureau of Statistics showed a smaller trade surplus than expected, a seasonally adjusted trade surplus of A$105 million in October, well short of the A$1.4 billion surplus expected.
Meantime the greenback remained well bid as the Bank of Canada’s interest rate review and ongoing issues for the UK in extracting itself from the European Union sapped appetite for alternative currencies.
The local currency eased to A90.85c from A90.93c and to 51.25 British pence from 51.32p on Wednesday and fell to 58.09c from
58.22c. It declined to ¥77.09 from ¥77.37 yesterday and to 4.5367 Chinese yuan from 4.5617 yuan. —