Where to now for long term investors of Telstra, page-790

With regards to 5G vs NBN discussion, I think there’s an incomplete understanding of why 5G will threaten NBN.

Yes fibre can delivers speed and capacity, though the stupid CVC charging model where bandwidth is heavily charged for means that NBN delivers only fair speed or fair capacity but not both simultaneously because where wireless transmission capacity is limited by bandwidth, NBN capacity/speed is limited by the charging model (which could change).

4G delivers moderate speed (up to 600Mbps if you are near the tower and traffic is light) and has limited capacity (one tower can probably supply maybe 1-3Gbps total). Note this is probably more than most NBN regions can supply per node, which would be more like 1Gbps.

5G can supply much, much more total bandwidth per tower than 4G. The exact amount will depend on spectrum available and distribution of users about the antenna (ie how much directional transmission can help) though is more in the region of 30-100Gbps per tower and likely more with each generation (6G, 7G etc). This is probably more than what is available for any of the 140ish NBN areas in total (each NBN area might supply around 50,000 - 200,000 connections). Note that upgrading the NBN will be very expensive and would take months for a single area. Every home modem needs upgrading, every cabinet needs new modems, copper needs to be replaced with fibre. Probably more expensive than the entire cost of 5G rollout. Upgrading an entire 5G area involved one set of radio gear for all the subscribers and is done in a few days.

Even without adding towers, adding 5G to every current 4G tower would supply a lot more total bandwidth than currently available from the NBN - around 10-100x more. Yes the NBN can be upgraded in the FTTP areas, though 5G will be available in the FTTN areas well before fibre will (maybe 5-7 years vs 15-20 years) and will likely almost wipe out the NBN subscriber base is those areas and hence fibre may well never be installed.

5G is certainly expensive to install. But installing and maintaining copper or fibre to all the premises with range of a tower is very much more so. As an analogy people may understand - think of having an electrician come to your house and install conduit, network cabling, and network points to each room, a patch board in a cupboard, a router with enough ports to supply all these - cost maybe $2000-$4000 for a new house or maybe $3000-$10000 to retrofit. Compare this to the telstra wireless n modem I received with my connection that reaches every room with speeds over 200Mbps and allows me to put my devices anywhere - supplied free to me though would only be about $200 to buy outright. This is analogous to NBN cable vs 5G/6G/7G/....... It is why cable in the ground will ultimately be doomed - too damned expensive - too damned hard to maintain - too damned expensive to upgrade.