news: telstra compete. the end?, page-7

TLS will kill UNW IMO.

Coverage of CDMA and/or GSM will wipe UNW's butt and then some more.

Check this bit of editorial - out today.

Rules of an unwired jungle
Abby Dinham, ZDNet Australia

Since its infancy, wireless broadband has been the domain of junior-league companies such as Unwired, iBurst, and Big Air. However, now Telstra has picked up its bat the juniors might find themselves playing a whole new ball game.
Unwired -- which launched its services earlier this year -- has already voiced concerns over competing against bigger players in the broadband market when the government announced spectrum auctions last August. Chief executive officer of Unwired, David Spence, said the process of spectrum allocation should be regulated to create a "level playing field" and that government intervention in the past has allowed other providers in the "local loop" to survive against Telstra.

However, according to Telstra, its initial wireless service will only target business customers in major cities and regional centres across Australia. The group said the wireless service was made possible by an AU$50 million upgrade to the data component of its CDMA mobile phone network that covers 98 percent of the Australian population. The telecommunications heavyweight said it would offer wireless Internet at speeds of 300 to 600 kilobytes per second.

This leads me – and I'm sure all of the small time providers – to wonder what this will mean for wireless Internet competition? Although Telstra doesn’t have the control over its competitors as it does in mobile and fixed line market place, it certainly has a bank account big enough to run services at a loss until the less affluent competition has withered and died. And call me a pessimist if you will, but perhaps when competition has been liquidated, Telstra -- in its full privatised glory -- will buy up the major share of the spectrum and further its empire over the airwaves.

The smaller providers are now praying to the Gods of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to protect their tiny democratic empire from the heavy handed fist of Telstra… and maybe we should all be doing the same, not just for the sake of competition but for the sake of the entire wireless broadband industry in Australia.

Bottom-line, things do not look good for the smaller provider as the rule of the jungle dictates that only the strongest will survive. Perhaps, however, if the ACCC can restrain the Telstra gorilla, some of the smaller monkeys can get a banana too.

Send your thoughts to [email protected].