John Linton
I continue to slog through the slough of despond that seems to be the environment surrounding every aspect of finding a wireless broadband service that can be offered by a small company like Exetel. I've begun the lengthy and delicate communications with the global mobile minute brokers (the ones that I've been informed about) that appear to be the only long term possibility of providing a service that will meet the needs of a large percentage of Australian users - and when I say lengthy, it will be at least 6 - 9 months before any solution could be reached; if in fact that turns out to be possible at all.
Concurrently I've begun to look at all of the other options one more time and have initiated new contacts within the organisations that could possibly realistically wholesale a wireless service. Our problem is that we aren't big enough to make the sorts of volume promises that are likely to be required and I'm too old and "wise" to bluster and exaggerate to get the dialogue started on such a basis.
In the mean time we will see what's possible with the remaining local wireless companies and we will even listen to what Unwired have to say having not spoken with them for over 18 months after their last disastrous attempt to bully us into changing the contract we had with them in ways that would have been totally disadvantageous to us. I must be more desperate than I thought I was.
Because of the unfortunate attitude of some personnel at Unwired we've been unable to improve the wireless service we offer to customers and that's not a good situation. Perhaps the Channel 7 takeover of Unwired will change things but, at least in terms of wholesale, it doesn't seem likely to me as they will clearly have their own needs and dealing with wholesale customers is unlikely to figure in their thinking other than to stop doing it altogether as I think they have already done with the ISPs who tried to sell on a wholesale basis (PeopleTelecom, InterNode, AAPT and possibly one or two others).
We have re-looked at the iBurst network which when we looked previously was not a suitable service for Exetel but it's changed substantially since we last seriously considered what we could offer if we became a wholesale buyer of access to it. It's grown a lot in coverage since we last looked but the wholesale costs are still very high and very difficult to "package" so that an end user sevice is attractive. It certainly wouldn't be suitable for anyone who wants to download more than a gigabyte but it may prove to be something that business 'travellers' could find attractive - though with all of the unsecured wireless networks that are available in virtually every part of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane that have any sort of office buildings "travelling internet" is something that is free in most places.
Providing we can reach sensible commercial terms, and assuming that there are no positive developments with Unwired, we will trial an iBurst based solution aiming at some specific 'market segments' starting in November
I'm still of the opinion that only a major mobile network is the long term answer for a wireless data service but we definitely need to replace our Unwired service in the not too distant future and that means we need to find a series of solutions that can be implemented over the next 18 - 24 months as, from what I've been able to find to date, there is no single solution anywhere in sight.