Alphalink director, Grant Kinkead, said take-up of the fledgling wireless service launched September 2002 was looking very strong. He said Alphalink has around 100 subscribers within the 11 suburbs it covers currently but claims "expressions of interest" from greater Melbourne are flooding in.
"We've got something like 4,000 people waiting to get on and its just matter of us covering as many suburbs as we can over the next 12 months," said Kinkead.
Kinkead claims around 40 to 50 per cent of those who express an interest in the service become customers.
The company said its first goal was to extend its coverage to greater metropolitan Melbourne before moving to regional parts of the state. Kinkead said the company hopes to cover the majority of Melbourne within two years.
Alphalink recently finalised pricing for its public spectrum wireless Internet access service.
Alphalink has retained the introductory price it has offered for the service -- limited to a cluster of Melbourne suburbs surrounding Carlton and Fitzroy -- and revealed three new usage plans.
After paying a one-off installation charge of AU$330, Alphalink's basic service, capped at three gigabytes, costs AU$27.50 per month. Moving up the ISP's usage scale Alphalink offers four-, six- and 10-Gigabyte plans at AU$44, AU$66 and AU$99 respectively.
However, Alphalink imposes additional bandwidth caps on its customers splitting the traffic allowance across three daily intervals. The bulk of the traffic allowance given to each customer must be used between 1 am to 8 am across the range of plans.
Kinkead said the company had no plans to roll-out the service outside Victoria.
I'm one of the happy customers. Can I say it's worth getting if you are in the areas covered by them. Downloads are heaps faster than dialup. 10 MB in maybe 4 or 5 minutes instead of 45 or so. transfer speed varies from 10 to 30 kbs sometimes more, much better than the usual 2 or 3 on dialup. Got to watch that download limit though. I went over my limit for the time between 5 pm and 1 am within the first 3 weeks, so i have to still use dialup at those times just if i want to check mail and browse. Any downloads have to wait until other times of the day. Apart from that the service is great. Go for it it you are in the right areas of inner Melbourne.