Australia Mobile sites infrastructure
Network partnering trial
In September 2003 Vodafone Australia and Telstra Wholesale announced a network partnering trial. The pilot project in central regional Victoria would assess the viability of sharing mobile base station infrastructure in areas where duplicate coverage exists.
If successful, Vodafone indicated that it would progress further network partnering with Telstra Wholesale on a commercial basis to minimise the costs of duplicated elements of each carrier’s GSM infrastructure in regional and rural Australia.
Telecoms and the real estate market
The announcement from Crown Castle in late 2005 that it is looking at selling its mobile towers in Australia made several people aware of this sub-segment of the market.
Interestingly, at my Roundtables, I increasingly encounter companies related to real estate asset management becoming involved in our industry. The enormous boom in telecoms requires more and more network coverage and more and more sites are needed for different infrastructure.
On the one hand we see that regional councils and communities are utilising their assets to attract new infrastructure players to their areas, assisting them in building better business cases for the deployment of new networks to their communities. They clearly understand the economic and social benefits of such policies. They actively use these assets to make it easier for infrastructure providers to develop business cases for the deployment of new services in their regions
However, the situation in metropolitan areas is quite different. Here the opposite is happening – there are more operators than assets that are available to extend infrastructure. So asset managers are looking for premium prices for the use of their facilities. This applies to mobile towers, as well as to assets close to telephone exchanges, to host, for example, Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer (DSLAM) equipment from Telstra’s competitors which are needed for the delivery of fixed broadband services.
At the same time new developments in wireless broadband have seen WiFi entering this space as well, and the new World Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX)-based developments will only increase the need for such facilities.
The uncertainties in these markets makes it so much more interesting for those companies who do understand the market and are able to make strong decisions regarding their future potential. Our own conservative estimate here is that the need for facilities to host telecoms towers and equipment is set to grow between 20% and 30% per annum over the next few years.
Industry taskforce for co-location
A National Carrier Co-ordination Group comprising Australia’s six mobile telephone carriers was formed in August 2000 to improve co-location of mobile phone facilities and promote industry liaison with local governments and the community.
The Carrier Co-ordination Group will develop a formal Code to support the government’s legislative requirement for co-location of mobile telephone facilities. It works with representatives of various consumer groups and local governments to ensure they adhere to the Communications Alliance Code that is intended to specify best contemporary practice in the area of design, installation and operation of radio communications infrastructure.
