Senator Coonan's office has hit back at Labor's communication spokesperson Stephen Conroy for comments he made about using VoIP over WiMax during a debate last week.
Towards the end of the Sky debate, broadcast in conjunction with ZDNet Australia, Conroy asked Coonan why she was supporting a broadband technology not guaranteed to work with VoIP.
"Would the Minister agree that one of the main benefits of broadband for small businesses is the ability to slash ... costs using voice over IP -- telephone calls over the Web.
"Why is she supporting the OPEL fixed wireless broadband network, which can't guarantee to deliver voice over the Internet," asked Conroy.
At the time, Coonan avoided the question, instead choosing to quote research that rated Australian broadband better than that used in the US, Germany and Japan. However, ZDNet Australia mid-week received an e-mail from Coonan's office, which said: "Conroy was completely wrong about VoIP on WiMax".
The e-mail contained a letter from Samsung Electronics in Korea, stating that "VoIP is a current feature of the Samsung WiMax 802.16e network equipment" and that the 802.16e was recently accepted as a global standard by the International Telecommunications Union.
Coonan's latest attack on Conroy was in retaliation for Labor's communications spokesperson accusing her of lying and "rewriting the laws of physics".
The problem with VoIP is that it requires high priority IP to function efectively - and that implies very low latency - which in turn requires low route congestion. To a large degree the reverse applies for data on Internet!
While engineering the Customer Access Network (CAN) for VoIP this is not an immense problem as the CAN is not switched - just shared to cut the speed - on its connection into the Inter-Exchange Network (IEN), where it is switched and very heavily shared with other Internet traffic. (A major metropolitan road with unsynchronised traffic lights is a common analogy to the IEN traffic.) For this to work properly - the IEN structure connecting to the WiMax CAN needs to be thick intersecting SDH ring structures running 10 Gb/s.
I believe that Coonan's Opel IEN will be very thin - just like Telecom Australia's regional network was in the 1970's, and because of that my engineering experience tells me that this network is a financial disaster waiting to happen.
The email from Samsung clears WiMax - but that is not the problem, and it does not matter if WiMax is ITU Rec. 802.16e or whatever. The IEN that it attaches to is not synergetic with the main (Telstra) IEN infrastructure and that to me beggars belief in basic common engineering sense and business sense!
Privatisation is like a starved horse - it loses weight, works really hard for a while then suddenly dies.
When Telstra dies, thanks to a long string of uncreditable policies that have seriously starved its revenue followed by a flow of unbelievable decisions that has made Telstra work incredibly hard (and charge its customers accordingly), I expect Australia to go down with it.