Intel says it’s excited by the arrival of WiMAX network in Perth and is working with the wireless telco towards a nationwide network.
With WiMAX finally gaining a serious commercial foothold in Australia, through the launch of Vividwireless’ $50 million WiMax network in Perth, Intel is keen to see the high-speed wireless broadband technology take off.
“We’re very excited about the introduction of WiMAX in Perth” Dan Anderson, Telco Alliance Manager for Intel Australia, told APC. “We’re looking forward to seeing it here in the eastern states and we’re working with Vividwireless to help that be successful”.
Following the planned introduction of WiMAX in Sydney and Melbourne, Vividwireless will expand the network to Brisbane, Canberra and Adelaide.
Anderson also tipped that some laptops with embedded WiMAX chips could be rolled out as the network expands.
“I think a lot of that will come down to when there’s sufficient scale in the number of subscribers, but certainly in the longer term that’s something you can reasonably expect.”
Intel has long been bolshie on WiMAX, although the technology has been slow to move from manufacturing to main street while 3G has leapt ahead by upgrading existing infrastructure to higher-speed HSPA base stations and handsets.
But “there’s room for both technologies”, Anderson says. “Wireless broadband has grown very strongly in Australia and with the amount of data traffic exploding, we’ll need all the spectrum that’s available, so whether it’s WiMAX or 3G doesn’t matter. They actually get very close together when we get to 4G or LTE.”
Intel began baking WiMAX into laptops with 2008's Centrino 2 'Montevina'
platform, such as this combo WiFi-WiMAX board
Widespread commercial deployment of WiMAX in Australia is long overdue, with the technology getting off to a false start in August 2005 when Intel invested $37 million in Unwired to help the carrier build a nationwide WiMAX network.
At the time, Unwired’s then-CEO David Spence said the first WiMAX base stations would be introduced to the carrier’s existing Sydney and Melbourne networks “in the first half of 2006”.
That never happened, but in 2008 Unwired unveilled a plan for a $500m mobile WiMAX network to blanket Australia's 20 biggest cities by 2010.
A year later, with Unwired's national WiMAX network still on the drawing board, Intel successfully took the carrier to court to get back its $37 million investment, with interest.
Vividwireless is formally a subsidiary of Unwired, which in 2007 was bought by Kerry Stoke’s Seven Network for $127 million, and plans to run its national WiMAX network on the same 3.5GHz and 2.3GHz bands for which Unwired holds a licence in Australia’s major metropolitan areas.
Vividwireless offers access to its Perth WiMAX network with plans ranging from $20 per month for 1GB of data to $100 for 40GB, with mobile USB modems and desktop gateway routers selling for $179 and $299 respectively.
Vividwireless chief executive Martin Mercer said the carrier would “offer ADSL-like speeds at ADSL or better prices”. While launch demonstrations showed a wireless connection that redlined at 14Mbps, Mercer has previously said users could expect maximum download speeds in excess of 20Mbps and average rates of at least 4Mbps.