South Australian ISP Internode has set up a WiMax service to provide broadband access to the Yorke Peninsula region west of Adelaide, but not before its new infrastructure was almost built over.
If the Coalition were back in power today it would bring back the $950 million rural broadband network plans which Communications Minister Stephen Conroy cancelled, Shadow Minister Nick Minchin said in a video interview with ZDNet.com.au last week.
An overlap between the OPEL network and existing wireless networks need not be a bad thing, according to analyst house Market Clarity.
The cost of connecting to Australia's forthcoming WiMax bush broadband will not be as expensive as some have suggested, according to OPEL, a joint venture between Elders and Optus, the company building the network.
The details of a scheme that promises the most far-flung Aussies a chance to get the same broadband as their city-dwelling cousins have been unveiled
Say what you will about Senator Stephen Conroy, but he is clearly not a man afraid of confrontation. Well, he'd better not be, because by killing off the OPEL WiMax project he has just set himself up for a battle with Telstra of Biblical proportions or a big meal of crow washed down with a $4.7 billion gift to SingTel Optus.
Post-election adrenaline surging through his veins, one of the first acts performed by new Communications Minister Stephen Conroy was to disband the expert panel that his predecessor Helen Coonan had appointed last June to evaluate tenders for fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) construction.
For no particular reason that I can discern, a 1979 Kenny Rogers song popped into my head as I was considering the ever more complex morass that is the national broadband network tender which Senator Stephen Conroy defended in his CeBIT keynote speech.
It wasn't too long ago that critics of WiMax wireless technology were declaring it dead at the starting gate.
Optus' involvement in the controversial government blacklist project could fall on either side of the fence. In kissing the ring, is Optus conceding that censorship is inevitable or hatching a scheme to discredit Conroy's folly from within?
When the government announced that Optus and Elders had won the bid to build Australia's bush broadband network, it provoked jeers and plaudits alike, but it was the ISPs' choice of WiMax as the bearer technology that has provoked the most furious storm of argument. Just how will the technology stand up to life in the bush?
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