There'll be a long wait for Opel WiMAX coverage maps

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 23 October 2007 18:07

Business IT - Networking

Maps realistically representing coverage of the planned Opel WiMAX network won't be appearing any time soon, says Optus, despite recent claims by shadow communications minister, Stephen Conroy.

Coverage of the network has been a controversial issue ever since communications minister, Helen Coonan, released maps for some electorates simply showing coverage as circles around base station sites.  Commentators pointed out that the claimed throughput and range were available only under line of site conditions and that the neat circles made no allowance for hills and other obstacles.

Last week, Conroy said he would release the complete set of maps showing the claimed coverage of the proposed Opel WiMAX broadband network, and that they would show coverage will be less than 50 percent of what has been promised. "The Opel broadband scheme has so many black spots; it looks like Swiss cheese," Conroy said. "The Howard Government's broadband plan is based on lies and the minister for communications should come clean."

For the first time today, Optus confirmed publicly that coverage would not match the neat circles portrayed in Coonan's maps but also indicated that it would not be producing public versions of detailed coverage maps any time soon.

Peter Ferris, Optus' general manager, technology and planning, told Terrapin's WiMAX conference in Sydney that, because Opel would be a wholesale only provider of services it would likely be up to individual resellers to issue coverage maps of their service areas. "From a technology planning perspective of Optus, I will never produce a map. The famous green dots on maps...were an aid to explain a geographic location to a politician not a detailed radio planning map," he said, but added that, Opel (which he explained did not yet exist) could choose to issue them once it had an executive able to make such a decision.

Ferris did however put up a slide showing coverage of the planned WIMAX network around Orange in NSW and it was indeed far from being neat circles. "Those little black dots represent physical addresses of residences in Australia in the databases that we have," he said. "As you can see radio does not go through mountains but it does provide you with coverage of a lot of black dots." However the map clearly showed numerous black dots around Orange that were not within the coverage area.