Unwired reveals key suppliers & plans for national WiMAX rollout

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 29 September 2009 00:55

IT Industry - Strategy

According to Unwired's manager regulatory & corporate affairs, David Havyatt, Huawei's ability to support LTE from the same equipment that supports WiMAX puts Unwired in the interesting position of being better positioned to offer LTE services than any of the three mobile network operators.

"Deploying WiMAX does not rule out deploying LTE in the future. We would definitely find it easier to deploy LTE than any other operators. We don't have that as a plan, but it would be very easy for us to deploy LTE."

This could happen if LTE is deployed widely by other operators and becomes popular driving down the cost of terminal equipment while WiMAX languishes. However Unwired's stated game plan is to evolve its network to 802.16m. Spence said "We wanted a platform that takes us up to full mobility what we call 802.16m. That is still a year or two away."

802.16m promises data rates of up to 1Gbps. This - and not 802.16e as Unwired and others regularly claim - will be a true 4G technology. However, standardisation is at least two years away and, if the history of 802.16e standardisation and product development is repeated, it will be several years beyond that before it becomes a commercial reality.

Unwired also claims to be significantly reducing rollout costs with its choice of PowerOne for power supplies, cabinets and batteries, According to Hamilton, at 200kgs the size and mass of these is such that they can be manhandled into lifts and into place without needing to hire cranes to lift them onto to rooftops.

Meanwhile Unwired's wireless networks in Sydney based on proprietary Navini technology continue to be the cash cow that funds the rollout of the Vividwireless network.

The last time Unwired gave any numbers for its subscribers in Sydney and Melbourne was July 2007 when it had about 77,000 subscribers. Spence won't update that figure other than to say: "it is down a bit" adding "it is remarkably resilient...It is the cash cow that is paying all our salaries."

And that salary bill has grown substantially in recent months. Spence said that Vividwireless had 22 staff in Perth and that, in Sydney, Unwired had recently hired an additional 20 to support the Vividwireless rollout.