Telco late starter in wireless venture

By PETER GRIFFIN

TelstraClear has belatedly joined the wireless broadband race, promising to deliver high-speed connections to businesses in Auckland and the regions in a deal with equipment vendor Siemens.

The Australian-owned telco will spend about $14 million over the next 18 months building wireless base stations to provide businesses with high-speed internet and voice telephony services over radio frequencies.

If successful in constructing its network, TelstraClear will effectively be able to use wireless technology to reach thousands of customers where it has no fibre or copper in the ground and cannot compete with Telecom.

TelstraClear is relatively late in embracing wireless broadband after having its heart set on rolling out cable across Auckland's suburbs, a plan that met several major barriers.

Siemens' business development manager, Philip Josephs, said the move would prove both economically and politically liberating.

"TelstraClear have a reliance to some extent on using Telecom lines where they don't have their own access. It will mean they won't have that reliance any more."

The equipment will work in the 3.5GHz spectrum band where TelstraClear has management rights to around 27MHz of spectrum.

Users will be able to connect from a distance of 7km to base stations, which are being built on existing TelstraClear sites, or land rented from partners such as BCL.

But unlike rival offerings from a joint venture between Walker Wireless and Vodafone, and another group comprising BCL and Telecom, TelstraClear has no interest in targeting rural customers or home users.

"This is primarily for the business sector, it's a targeted deployment," said TelstraClear's head of infrastructure services, Bill Clince.

No details of pricing have yet been disclosed.

The wireless service would offer access speeds of up to 2Mbps (megabits per second), or true broadband speeds.

Israeli company Alvarion, of which Siemens is a shareholder, will supply the access devices.

A VoIP (voice over internet protocol) gateway would allow users to connect ordinary analog handsets to the system.

However, Josephs said that would require additional hardware.

"When [TelstraClear] decide to launch voice on the service they will need an additional box and it's yet to be determined what that device will be."

TelstraClear joins three other joint ventures developing wireless businesses:

* Walker Wireless, Vodafone and IP Wireless.

* BCL, Telecom and Airspan.

* Wired Country and Remec.