Counties Power selects wireless provider for broadband network

By ADAM GIFFORD

Lines company Counties Power has selected San Diego-based Remec to provide the wireless access devices for its broadband network, paving the way for true "last mile" competition with Telecom on Auckland's southern fringe.

The decision, reached after months of negotiation with a number of competing vendors, means most of the bits are in place for the May 6 commercial launch of its $21 million Wired Country project.

What is missing is a voice carrier - the only service provider who has so far signed up to sell Wired Country bandwidth is Iconz, which for now is focussing on data services for business users.

Counties Power chief executive Neil Simmonds said other service providers are still working through technical issues.

"The want to sort out their access and how they will do voice and so on before they give us their autograph," Simmonds said.

Counties Power has based Wired Country on the power industry model where it will build the network - a combination of fibre and wireless access - and allow other companies to retail services across it.

The Remec ExelAir 70 equipment is capable of speeds of up to 57Mbps, but Simmonds said most retailers are likely to offer speeds around 1Mbps or below.

Iconz is starting out with a 256Kbps flat rate connection for $99 a month or 512Kbps for $120 a month.

That compares with Telecom's Jetstream, which is charged according to expected downloads starting at $80 a month for 600MB and up to $906 for 10,000MB. Excess usage over the monthly data caps is charged at betewen 11c and 18c/MB.

Simmonds said the Remec gear can cope with large numbers of users in urban areas, and also has the range to reach rural users.

"It can go over 20km, so we can reach south of the Waikato River," he said.

The company has resource consent to built a tower on Pukekohe Hill, and will also site transmitters on Red Hill and Papakura and sites between.

"We will concentrate on close in customers because can get more into the same bandwidth," Simmonds said.

Most of Counties Power's 25,000 residential and business customers would line in that strip.

Under the Remec deal, Counties Power will buy base station units and over 3000 customer units for use in stage one of Wired Country, which includes most of Pukekohe, parts of Papakura and the corridor between them.

Simmonds said this will cost upwards of $3 million.

Remec's ExelAir 70 equipment is relatively clunky, with the customer premises equipment consisting of an aerial, a network interface adapter, a power supply and an optional unit for voice over internet protocol. These will be included in the monthly rental.

Counties Power is also bidding in the Provincial Broadband Extension (Probe) project for government funds to deploy broadband to both the Franklin and Auckland regions .

Simmonds said because Remec uses the same FDD (Frequency Division Duplexing) as the AirSpan equipment chosen by state owned network company BCL, Counties does not expect a similar legal challenge as faced by Walker Wireless.

Counties paid $1.4 million for two 7MHz pairs of spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band next to BCL. Walker has spectrum adjoining BCL frequencies in the 2GHz band, which it wants to make use of with TDD (Time Division Duplexing) technology.

"I have not heard of any problems from an engineering standpoint. People are supposed to work together and we are sure we are on solid ground ," Simmonds said.