Flying without wires

Businesses may be the biggest beneficiaries, especially smaller businesses. Wireless broadband can set an SMB free from Telstra and give bigger pipes that help them adopt more efficient IP-based ways of doing things. Crunching more data -- and consolidating functionality via the medium of true broadband -- may be the way to go for many, he suggests.

Reliability and security fears have been largely dispelled as people realise wireless is pretty much the same as any other broadband internet medium. Meanwhile, BigAir has also teamed up with Melbourne-based wireless broadband purveyor Access Providers – a network-sharing move that lets both companies broaden their national reach and achieve those attractive economies of scale.

"We are really competing head-on against traditional broadband services like frame relay, ISDN and ADSL, ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) and fibre," Ashton says.

BigAir hit the headlines in recent months when a group of residents in one wealthy Sydney suburb decided they objected to BigAir’s placing of antennae boxes on the outside of their building and relayed their complaints to a popular current affairs TV show.

However, Ashton says the incident was a minor glitch and an isolated incident. "That was the only place we have had any serious difficulty finding sites," he says.

The problem seemed to be that the residents believed the antennae boxes were like mobile phone towers -- unsightly additions potentially full of dangerous electromagnetic radiation. The residents were wrong -- the boxes are, first of all, hardly visible from outside the building and, second, give off a relatively small amount of radiation, Ashton notes.

BigAir is heading west in Sydney, expanding its network through Parramatta, Blacktown and the north-west business parks. "We think there’s more opportunity in the western suburbs anyway, because there’s so little infrastructure out there. There’s so little ADSL and fibre is very expensive to get connected," Ashton says.

The wireless ISP sees being on the WiMAX road map and Quality of Service (QoS) as critical for business applications. Many BigAir customers are businesses moving to VoIP. There’s no point giving them low or unreliable bandwidth. "Quite a few are using VoIP over their own networks," Ashton says.

He says BigAir bundles in offerings such as pre-configured IP handsets for its business customers where required. The key is to make things convenient for the customers. "They’re into IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and that sort of stuff," Ashton says. "We’ve got so much bandwidth we can support the voice traffi c and the data traffic without any issues."

Bandwidth tends to be website-dependent rather than network-dependent. For the most part, if a customer pays for 10MB/s, that is what he or she will get if all other factors are equal.

High-traffic websites that will slow everybody down are a main cause of bandwidth loss, Ashton suggests. "Or if you have a big office of 10, 20, 100 people with multiple users doing a lot of things. But when we sell a 10Mb/s service, you get it," he says. "That’s where it comes in really handy for business -- you do get the full line speed."

BigAir has started working with resellers and more channel opportunities may be in the pipeline. The Sydney ISP started teaming up with integrators about three months ago and is interested in partnering companies with SMB customers. "We’ll be able to introduce alternative broadband services for them," Ashton says. "[We’re interested in] not national-type businesses but those that have a strong customer base within a local area. So when we build the coverage in that local area, they don’t just bring in another branded DSL product."

Ashton says BigAir is still focused mainly on Sydney and interested in talking to Sydney system integrators and networking integrators. "Not just centrally, but further out," he adds. Brisbane and elsewhere will eventually come under BigAir’s aegis, probably when the ISP feels it has nearly exhausted its Sydney possibilities for coverage expansion, Ashton suggests.

Brennan's Lovegrove: iBurst rounds out services portfolio

Matt Lovegrove, sales and marketing manager at iBurst reseller Brennan IT, says wireless broadband is proving a useful value-add. What’s more, the technology actually works. Lovegrove says 10 years in the industry have made him cynical, but he was actually impressed with iBurst. "A brave new world of always-on, alwaysavailable communication is here...for better or worse," he gushes.

Lovegrove says wireless broadband is one example of a product that can help bring enterprise capability to the SMB. The iBurst wireless broadband product – as marketed by Personal Broadband Australia (PBA) until that company was acquired by telecommunications reseller Commander earlier this year – is mobile wireless broadband. That is, it lets users take it on the road wherever they go within the iBurst network.

"It’s pretty good," Lovegrove says. "But there’s not a lot of money to be made on iBurst services, so it’s not a lead product for us. Rather, it rounds out our services portfolio."