Woosh & Telecom - together at last

By Steve Biddle, in General, posted: 15-May-2006 08:55

I guess the inevitable has happened & Woosh have realised they are a lame duck who will be out of business by Xmas unless they can roll out a network that can actually work. There have been many people out there (like myself) who have always said that Woosh was a lot closer to Telecom than they made out. Telecom believed Woosh being successful would prove there was no case for ULL in NZ, things just haven't quite worked out that way and now Woosh have accumulated losses of $120 million and investors who have no hope of ever getting a return but have no choice put to pump more money into a lame duck or close it down. This announcement could be rather interesting and makes you wonder if Telecom simply did a deal to stop somebody else (Slingshot anybody?) getting access to Woosh's existing cellsites to add WiMax gear too

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=93&objectid=10381809

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Comment by juha, on 15-May-2006 11:43 , user id: 16775)

Interesting angle. How wide are the frequency bands in question?

Author's note by sbiddle, on 15-May-2006 12:21 , user id: 1387)

The frequency bands for TDD-CDMA? As I see it Woosh have no future at all with their current business model but their biggest asset is their cellsites because we know how hard it is under the RMA to even put one up in the first place. Slingshot announced their plans to roll out WiMAX in Northland so if you could cheaply acquire an existing competitors infrastructure it would be a big step since I doubt Woosh have any money to change their technology. We all know ULL isn't going to deliver cheap broadband to everybody and that wireless is the cheapest way of getting broadband & phone service to large numbers of people and that WiMAX is potentially the technology that could do this. Hence Telecom stepping in to "save" Woosh because IMHO Annette Presley could easily be the next TG in this country having the network and $$ behind her already to do whatever she wants.

Comment by juha, on 15-May-2006 12:51 , user id: 16775)

No, the 2.3GHz bands. It's not pukka WiMAX is it, but WiBro...

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/blog.asp?blogid=22&postid=312

Wonder they're thinking about offering a phone service here, with Korean handsets?

Hmm, Annette swapping places with Theresa...

Author's note by sbiddle, on 15-May-2006 13:40 , user id: 1387)

Now what would be *really* interesting in NZ would be 700Mhz WiMAX. We have spare UHF TV spectrum, why not make use of it!

Comment by juha, on 15-May-2006 15:35 , user id: 16775)

Isn't there a limit trade-off between high (lots of data fits in, poor reach/penetration) and low (less data but better reach/penetration) frequencies that rules out UHF for data transmission?

Author's note by sbiddle, on 15-May-2006 15:56 , user id: 1387)

Not necessarily, a lot simply depends on the amount of spectrum available. 700MHz is being hyped up as the perfect frequency for WiMAX so it will be interesting to see if anybody looks at it in NZ.

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Steve Biddle
Wellington
New Zealand

I'm an engineer who loves building solutions to solve problems.

My interests and skillset include:

*VoIP (Voice over IP). I work with various brands of hardware and PBX's on a daily basis
-Asterisk (incl trixbox, PiaF, FreePBX, Elastix and AsteriskNOW)
-Polycom
-Cisco
-Linksys
-Patton
-Zyxel
-Snom
-Sangoma
-Audiocodes

*Telecommunications/Broadband
-xDSL deployments
-WiMAX
-GSM/WCDMA

*Structured cabling
-Home/office cabling
-Phone & Data

*Computer networking
-Mikrotik hardware
-WAN/LAN solutions

*Wireless solutions
-Motel/Hotel hotspot deployments
-Outdoor wireless deployments, both small and large scale
-Temporary wireless deployments

*CCTV solutions
-Analogue and IP

You can contact me here or by email at stevenbiddle@gmail.com

twitter.com/stevebiddle

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