The Analysis

First, what is WhistleOut? Whistleout is a business that has built an online price comparison tool to try and make it easier for people to make informed decisions about what they spend their cash on. The company's director and founder is a man named Cameron Craig. In email correspondence with Popsci.com.au, Mr Craig says that, prior to setting up the site a few years ago, he was “a book publisher for 10 years.” He has no other professional or academic background in the telecommunications industry.

The website is also made available to several other online brands to incorporate into their sites, so their readers can use them as well. These clients include various news and media websites.

The actual WhistleOut analysis itself is fairly straightforward. Current ADSL2+ plans from four ISPs - Exetel, Internode, iiNet and iPrimus - are ranked into categories based on gigabyte quota. These are then compared to various speed marks on the NBN network, resulting on an average price per gigabyte based on the publicly announced prices of NBN plans. These prices include any mandatory costs, not just the data usage cost. This includes things such as line rental.

This neat little bit of number crunching shows that, at 12mbps, which is the about the upper speed imit most people can ever hope to get on copper, the NBN can save as little as a quarter and as much as 43 per cent per month. At the other end of the scale, for higher speeds and data limits, you can expect to pay a little more.

So far, so good.

The Problem

The difficulties came in a couple of ways. The first is that Mr Craig was interviewed by the ABC for their radio current affairs program, PM. Keep in mind that, aside from his abilities as an interested party with a website that has just produced an analysis on pricing, Mr Craig isn’t especially qualified to weigh in on the wider technology debate. The interviewer asked him a concluding question: “There had been an argument from some quarters that mobile broadband is improving at such a pace that a fixed line network is not necessary; what's your take on that?”

To which Mr Craig replied, “That's absolutely the case. The speed increases that we've seen over the past couple of years have been mind-blowing, compared to where we were six years ago. The speed at which you can download wirelessly it just floors me and I don't think that's going to stop. “

He also said that, in regards to wireless speeds, he could “absolutely foresee speeds equivalent to or faster than the top tier fibre speed. “

Initially, this struck us as a little out of place.

But what struck us as more odd was when News Ltd blogger Andrew Bolt jumped on this quote, from an interview otherwise in support of the nation-spanning fibre network, and took it to mean that such support from Mr Craig was lacking.

The truth, in the end, is rather more simple. When we asked Mr Craig to clarify his comments, he was already writing a clarification on his blog, which says “It [his response in the ABC interview] was an off hand comment at the end of an interview about price tiering. The whole interview and analysis was about the tiers on the NBN price plans (12Mbps, 25Mpbs, 50Mpbs and 100Mbps) and their relative prices. The top 'tier' fibre I referred to was the price tier of 100Mbps.”

He also said it would be “nuts” if fibre practical limits did not increase as well as wireless ones.

The Answers

So if that was indeed his perspective, why didn’t he say that in his answer? He told us that “I didn't respond to the second part of the question as I was trying to avoid engaging in a debate of the merits between of fixed line vs wireless as that is not our area of expertise and not what we were talking about.”

So in light of that, we decided to find an expert to clarify. This particular expert’s name is Professor Rod Tucker who, amongst other things, is the Director of the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society at the University of Melbourne, and who has spoken and written previously about fibre optics and the NBN.

So, in the end, is there any truth in the wireless-is-superior argument?

Simply, according to Professor Tucker, mobile networks “have an ultimate capacity, and we’re approaching that capacity quickly,” further noting that the previously rapid increases in wireless speeds cannot be expected to continue at the same rate.

He says that while it’s true wireless networks can reach relatively high speeds in comparison to current wired networks when only serving data to a single user, they tend to struggle if required to do the same to large numbers of devices.

“Mobile broadband is increasing, but it is increasing from a low base... It will never, can never match the capacity of a fixed network.”

The University also has a helpful whitepaper on wireless in place of fixed line networks here, that goes more into the science of the two technologies.