John Linton
Exetel continues to try and put in place a wireless broadband offering that will provide a wider coverage and lower cost of entry than the current Unwired service we have been offering for three years now. As with any investigation you tend to cast your net pretty wide in searching for information but I was taken aback by today's iTWire article that dropped in to my inbox this morning:
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/14797/127/
While quoting a third party (in this case a spokesperson for GoTalk) isn't definitive/100% factual, it seems astounding to me that he appeared to say that there are " between 40,000 and 50,000 unused iBurst modems in Australia at the moment". If that were true then it seems that some people have spent over $A10 million on modems for a service that they don't use.
Perhaps he meant 4,000 to 5,000 or was misquoted by the journalist? I have no facts but I would have thought that it was highly unlikely that iBurst would have sold 40,000 modems in total since it began offering the service - however let me repeat - I have no facts other than the published figures from Unwired in their successive annual and half yearly reports that put their total connected customer base (and those figures are unlikely to be 'under-stated') at around 70,000 after 4 years of intensive advertising and promotion. I would think it unlikely that iBurst has sold more modems than Unwired but have never seen any published figures for iBurst.
Whatever the actual figure is, it seems very odd that iBurst would 'publish' it. From our own experiences of buying back and re-supplying Navini modems for the Unwired service and the eBay method of on selling unwanted modems it seems unlikely that there would be very many wireless modems not in use. If there were 40,000 to 50,000 (and I can't believe the quoted figures were correct) it would seem to point to a significant problem with the service itself - why else would someone pay $200 - $300 for a modem and then stop using it?
I hope someone from iBurst contacts iTWire and gets a correction made.
Exetel personnel have been doing some tests of the iBurst service around the country over the past few weeks with the pedictable mixed results (wireless coverage is always going to be highly variable at these early stages of network deployment). Our, not definitive testing, seems to indicate that where there is coverage the service is acceptable for the 'mobile' user but wouldn't suit a 'fixed' user - neither the speed nor the likely plan download allowance would meet such a user's requirements - in my opinion.
The best wireless service we have tested to date (in terms of both speed, sustained connectivity and coverage) has been the Vodafone 3G service but, at least at the moment, the cost of data on that service is very, very expensive. The "3' service was fast and far more affordable but coverage was far more limited than the Vodafone service but better than either the Unwired or iBurst services.
It seems that the only sensible wireless broadband avaialble in Australia right now is a "3" service bought directly from "3" providing your needs are met by their coverage areas.
We will continue to consider all available options and have two more areas of opportunity to explore over the next 6 - 8 weeks but my view, at least right now, is that wireless broadband is a premium priced service for a relatively small number of user types.
I hope to be proved wrong in the not too distant future and that the WiMAx future is a lot closer than it appears to be from what I've currently found out.
In the meantime we continue to make some progress with a 'business' WiMax solution and, depending on the availability of internal resources we might activate a pioneer service early in the new calendar year - either on our own or in 'partnership' with another company.