WiMax build to be a fight between two suppliers

It appears that a two-horse race is on the cards for Unwireds national metropolitan WiMax broadband network with a possible tie between Motorola and Huawei in their fight for the $200 million contract to build the network.

David Spence, the chief executive officer for Unwired said that the possibility of either giving the construction contract to just one of the suppliers of network equipment or to split it between both of them was currently being decided by the wireless internet provider.

Mr Spence said “We have two suppliers currently operating demonstration networks – Motorola and Huawei – and we’ll decide which gets which part, or which one we choose at a later date.”
Having received a capital injection of $37 million from Intel, the chip manufacturer, plans to build a national WiMax network were announced in August 2005 by Unwired, which was acquired in November 2007 by the Seven Group.

The network was based in Sydney and at the time the company said that Perth, Canberra, Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane would be the next location it would be extended. Sydney and Melbourne are currently the two places where Unwired offers non-WiMax wireless broadband services.

Melbourne and Sydney were the first networks it had planned to begin converting to WiMax, then Perth, Canberra, Adelaide and Brisbane were the capitals it would be extending to next.

The rollout had, however, been continually pushed back by Unwired, although the fact that development of WiMax network standards had been delayed has been the reason the search for an equipment supplier has taken Unwired so long.

The start of construction for the Unwired network was set for 2007 but in May it advised that a second delay had been hit. Even though current economic conditions were getting worse, Mr Spence advised recently that the construction of the network would still go ahead.

The fact that mobile carriers were quickly running out of that capacity to serve their customer due to the fast uptake of 3G mobile broadband services was something the CEO said was of no concern.

Unwired has confirmed that it has no interest in competing with mobile voce providers even though its new 4G WiMax network will have the ability to offer mobile services.