An article by Brian Williamson of Plum on “Nomadicity and the evolution of applications, networks and policy” is published in Telecommunications Journal of Australia.

The article concludes that the incremental external social gains from a move from current to next generation broadband are likely to be significantly larger for mobile than for fixed networks. The reason for this is that wide area coverage and smart mobile devices can support applications that fixed cannot, mobile is likely to contribute more to getting the final third of the population online and spectrum reallocation would result in gains from trade that are not privately appropriable since spectrum utilised for broadcasting is generally non-tradable.

The paper also presented a graphical way of thinking about the changing competitive position of wireless relative to fixed current and next generation access.  A key point is that capacity (the horizontal axis) may be a more important competitive advantage of fixed than speed in the near term as wireless migrates to LTE.