Indeed. I always thought Vodafone bit off far more than they could chew buying Telstra Clear.

quickymart:

 

Indeed. I always thought Vodafone bit off far more than they could chew buying Telstra Clear.

 

From my outside and uninformed view (other than acquisitions I've been involved in or done myself on a much MUCH smaller scale), 90% of the time a merger is successful is due Diligence. I don't think VF did near enough DD for a purchase of that size and obvious complexity. I don't 

know if they had clear (excuse the pun) enough ideas on what they wanted out of it and therefore didn't prepare resources for handling those goals. They needed a team much more experienced in LARGE acquisitions to lead the charge, rather than expecting the existing team to handle it. 

How did this get from Woosh liquidation to Vodafone strategy?

We were with Woosh for over 10 years.  We got an email from Slingshot (who took over our account) yesterday (28th) to say that the Administrators had not agreed to keep the email service running and that our Woosh addressed emails would be bounced from the 31st.  Pretty low way to treat people, whoever is doing the administering - 4 days notice - 2 of which are weekend  ;)

And today Woosh is shutting down their broadband service in Southland for good

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/81566273/Woosh-Wireless-internet-gets-the-cut

wonder who will take over the assets, can't imagine there is much of a market for old towers in deep dark southland. Also these sites are usually leased to landowners, wonder if they have been getting paid?

langi27:

 

wonder who will take over the assets, can't imagine there is much of a market for old towers in deep dark southland. Also these sites are usually leased to landowners, wonder if they have been getting paid?

 

Someone also probably has to pay to remove the towers.

mattwnz:

 

langi27:

 

wonder who will take over the assets, can't imagine there is much of a market for old towers in deep dark southland. Also these sites are usually leased to landowners, wonder if they have been getting paid?

 

 

 

 

Someone also probably has to pay to remove the towers.

 

I dont think so.

One of the crazy things in NZ is there is very little co-location so each provider spends a fortune on resource consent.

If one of the major Teleco's wanted to expand their coverage or covert these over to RBI, this would be very easy and a lot more cost effective than building new sites.

John

The problem with co location is someones antennas have to go at the top.

Also if the towers are in areas that are already well served by other sites as you would assume they would be since they would be picking sites with a good population in the footprint, than all they would add for another network is the people that can see the ex woosh tower and cannot see their existing ones. Would that small population be worth resotration of these old towers to be in good condition and then the conversion to fit the new telcos gear vs just sticking it on a new tower that opens up a whole customer base with no coverage at all?

And yet again, I see 0 on Woosh's website about all this (and I would deem this a fairly major announcement). Do they even bother to update the website anymore?

I looked a Woosh in the early days, but they were charging more or less the same as ADSL. There was no price difference to make it worth while mucking around with marginal coverage and extra antenna's.

I was told by a friend who worked designing cell towers that Woosh's technology was old and stretched to its limits and that was 10 years ago.

Did they ever go 3g in the end or was it still proprietary modems?

I wondered why they never paired up with 2Degrees, because 2Degrees had  a growing network for years before they reached the legal threshold at which they could launch & must have been looking at ways to earn revenue from otherwise dark towers.

tripper1000:

 

I looked a Woosh in the early days, but they were charging more or less the same as ADSL. There was no price difference to make it worth while mucking around with marginal coverage and extra antenna's.

 

I was told by a friend who worked designing cell towers that Woosh's technology was old and stretched to its limits and that was 10 years ago.

 

 

 

Did they ever go 3g in the end or was it still proprietary modems?

 

 

 

I wondered why they never paired up with 2Degrees, because 2Degrees had  a growing network for years before they reached the legal threshold at which they could launch & must have been looking at ways to earn revenue from otherwise dark towers.

 

I remember them have a popup kiosk in Westfield Queensgate around 2004/2005 to show off the technology and speed, discovered they were linked to a terminal server I guess up in Auckland hence speedtest.net gave a very high result

DjShadow:

 

 

 

I remember them have a popup kiosk in Westfield Queensgate around 2004/2005 to show off the technology and speed, discovered they were linked to a terminal server I guess up in Auckland hence speedtest.net gave a very high result

 

thats slightly deceptive....

Slightly off-topic, but (while I'm thinking of it) is Gasp (www.gasp.co.nz) still in operation? Another outfit that hasn't updated their website in ages. I used to have a friend in Wellington who had service with them, but I'm fairly sure he doesn't anymore.