Where to now for long term investors of Telstra, page-799

It will be interesting to see what happens. Much will depend on how 5G actually performs.

If 5G is all it’s promised to be then the connection speed and data allowances will be highly competitive with NBN. Telcos won’t of course have to pay the $30-$40 per month connection fee or the hefty CVC fees to the NBN if people connect via 5G so it’s very possible that Telcos will be able to offer 5G broadband data plans cheaper than NBN plans. Without the CVC peak congestion that strangles the NBN throughput will likely blow NBN out of the park at peak times.

With the convenience of portability and the better reliability (given the modem will be able to lock on to any of several towers and fallback to 4G if needed) the trickle could become a flood, especially if prices are similar or lower. There’s also quite a bit of turnover of services (every time someone moves house plus other reasons) that might well go for 5G rather than be without internet for days to weeks.

When Joe Bloggs calls Telstra for a new Service and they say that they can either have 1000GB on NBN with a two week wait and speeds of maybe 20-40Mbps for $89 per month or they can have 1000GB per month on 5G immediately with speeds varying from 250Mbps to 10 Gbps and total portability for $89 it’s not hard to see what they’ll choose. Lots of people have already gone landline free and use mobile phone and mobile broadband only, and lots only keep a landline (but have to pay for it) to access ADSL or NBN. Going mobile on 5G will free them from having a landline.