Rural broadband proposal unfair, Woosh claims

Photo / Paul Estcourt

Telecom and Vodafone's tilt at boosting rural broadband speeds has been labelled anticompetitive by a rival.

The Telecom/Vodafone rural bid includes a 3000km extension to Telecom's fibre network and Vodafone building 154 new cell towers available for use by all mobile network operators.

Woosh strategic adviser Martyn Levy said the Telecom/Vodafone proposal was "prohibitive and anticompetitive" for competing telecommunications service providers.

"Local and regional service providers will suffer because for them to sell stuff off the towers they then have to finance their own WiMax or LTE network if they can get spectrum, which they can't."

He said the only alternative for telecommunications service providers would be to become a wholesaler off Vodafone's network, which was neither competitive or innovative.

Woosh, as part of a consortium with state-owned telecommunications network company Kordia (together branded OpenGate) and fibre specialist FX Networks, has been shortlisted alongside Telecom/Vodafone and a Maori-backed bid, Torotoro Waea, in a pitch for a $300 million industry fund to improve rural broadband speeds.

Its plan involves FX Networks running fibre to rural cell towers from which the high speed TD-LTE wireless technology would be deployed using a 70 megahertz block of 2.3GHz spectrum and existing cell tower infrastructure owned by Woosh and Kordia.

Levy said the OpenGate solution would create an open access wholesale network that allowed retail service providers to plug their equipment into an ethernet port in the customer's home.

He said two companies already owned or had access to three-quarters of the 500 sites needed to bring broadband at speeds of at least 10 megabits per second to 83 per cent of rural New Zealand.

Woosh, which this week announced it had made its first full-year profit of $1.28 million, has previously stumbled in its ambitions to become a wireless telecommunications operator through backing a technology that failed to gain global scale.