Abbott's claim that wireless was a substitute for a nationwide fibre-to-the-home network has been met with derision by the industry, which claims his plan would require a mobile tower on every street, push up internet prices and fail to support future applications that the public will demand.
Geoff Huston, chief scientist at APNIC, said the Coalition's plan to fall back on technologies such as wireless would end up running into capacity constraints due to a lack of spectrum and make broadband prohibitively expensive for most people.John Lindsay, carrier relations manager at ISP Internode, said the Coalition's broadband policy is "just technical ignorance on a national scale and frankly Australians deserve better than that".
"Inside the industry the view is that they don't really know what they're talking about and that they've just rehashed [their policy from] 2005," he said.
Huston, an expert in internet architectures, said it was extremely challenging to "get high speed data through the air" and the limited availability of wireless spectrum meant we would fast run into capacity problems.
"What's going to happen with wireless is that as we crowd it, only those with the deepest pockets will be able to afford it, so rather than being a communications medium for everyone, it becomes only a medium for the few who can afford to pay," Huston said.
"For the same $50 a month that people pay for a couple of gigabytes of wireless, they can get 10-20 times that amount of data down the wire - wireless has its role but it also attracts a premium price."
