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Last week Singtel/Optus announced it would be expanding UMTS (the dominant 3G standard worldwide) into regional/rural Australia, to compete against the “incumbent” (as they call Telstra). Let’s delve into some technical details on this topic.

Optus are investigating the possibility of deploying UMTS in the recently defined UMTS Band VIII (NodeB Tx: 925-960MHz, UE Tx: 880-915MHz). This is the exact same spectrum as EGSM900 (and deliberately so, to allow owners of GSM900 spectrum to transition to UMTS). For Optus, this means in regional/rural areas, Optus can re-allocate some of the EGSM900 spectrum to UMTS with no additional spectrum purchase required.

As it stands now, UMTS is offered in its original Band I (1900MHz up / 2100MHz down) by the Hutchison-Telstra alliance and the Optus-Vodafone alliance in metropolitan Australia. Additionally, Telstra’s heavily promoted ‘Next G’ operates on UMTS band V (850MHz), which operates on the exact same frequencies as used by GSM850 (again, for reasons discussed earlier). UMTS850 is not a commonly-used – yet - UMTS band - the only way Telstra can feasibly use this is because Cingular Wireless-AT&T in the United States (with over 60 million subscribers) has chosen to use this band, as it owns existing GSM850 spectrum.

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As you may already know, Optus operate a UMTS2100 3G network in addition to their GSM900/1800 network. In fact those Optus 2G customers that have bought a recent UMTS-capable phone may have noticed that they are using the 3G network in many cases when in urban areas despite not actually being 3G customers. We can see that the distinction between a 2G customer and a 3G customer is now rather blurred.

Until recently however you would still be using plain old GPRS (Optus does not offer EDGE currently) if you were such a customer, limiting you to a typical 50-60 kbit at best. Now, Optus allow access to data transfer over the UMTS network to 2G customers with a 3G phone. This is great news for people like myself on a good value legacy plan who have no interest in the current crop of 3G services other than IP internet. Anyway, here are some quick figures on performance:

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Being in South East Queensland at the moment, with limited access to dial-up, I decided it would be the perfect opportunity to try out Vodafone’s data bundles, which are described here .

Now my standard provider I use for light GPRS usage, Optus, charges 0.55c/kB (decreasing to 0.33c/kB as usage increases) on GPRS Plan 2. Held up against the rest of the market offerings, this would be considered some of the cheaper pricing, as the average users are paying is the “standard” 2.2c/kB.

Unfortunately of course, this works out to around $5/meg, and with even some light email usage, instant messaging, and of course, the mobile bandwidth killer – web browsing, this can result in a very expensive bill.

I chose the $49.95/month “Power Use” package, which implies unlimited usage but the legal print suggests that 500M is considered excessive. I was able to easily apply at a Vodafone store, with no other fees (BYO handset) charged to me.

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If you happened to find yourself in an emergency situation, it’s quite possible that you, or someone with you has a mobile phone to call for help. But many people do not know that with GSM phones it is a little more complicated than dialing 000. In fact, there is another number which may succeed where 000 may not.

In this post I explain this mess of a situation we have, as well as cover the details on another widely publicized topic – the reason for the increased number of false 000 calls from mobiles.

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