John Linton
We have been looking for a replacement to the Unwired "wireless" DSL offering for over 18 months but have failed to find a really good solution. The Unwired solution never really developed, as least from our perspective as a wholesale customer, as Unwired seemed to lose all interest in wholesaling their service and Exetel only remains as a wholesale customer as Unwired insisted on a 5 year contract.
At it's peak there were over 2,500 Exetel/Unwired customers and for the majority of those customers the service was quite acceptable. Unwired were always very slow in upgrading their base stations and backhaul network so for some customers there were periods of poor speeds and drop outs but that was not the experience of the majority.There are still a large number of Exetel/Unwired users who have been with us for more than two years (almost half of the customers who signed up in the first month of offfering the service three years ago this month are also still with us).
We would have been happy enough to have continued using the Unwired network as it provided a solution for a significant number of people but Unwired clearly didn't want the inconvenience of wholesale customers so we started to look for alternatives.
There is a very obvious opportunity for the mobile telephone providers to provide DSL over their fully established GSM networks and all of them have begun to do this. Exetel have been talking with Three and Vodafone about a wholesale arrangement but have made only glacially slow progress to date. We haven't talked with Optus Wholesale who seem to have a good offeing via their Virgin mobile subsidiary.
We would expect to conclude some sort of arrangement with Three in the not to distant future but it will be a re-sale arrangement not the wholesale deal we really need to provide both difference and competitive value in the market. However, if it's successfully concluded, it will be a start to offering DSL without the need for a telephone line and that is something that is very inmportant if the problems of pricing that will always be present in re-selling a TW service are to be overcome in the future.