Optus and Verizon win Vividwireless internet deals

Perth WiMAX builder reveals suppliers.

Vividwireless has revealed Verizon and Optus among a laundry list of vendors to provide products and services to the $50 million WiMAX network in Perth.

Unwired, which is building the network for vividwireless, said that it would buy internet access services from Optus and Verizon for redundancy.

Optus would also be tasked with providing fibre links from the point of presence (POP) - to be located in the Perth iX data centre - out to the hub sites (which are Huawei base stations with a Juniper site switch).

Several satellite sites or base stations would be connected to the hub sites using microwave link hardware supplied by Canadian vendor DragonWave.

"This represents the first major carrier win for DragonWave in Australia," said the companys director of business development, Christopher Russell.

The Vividwireless network will use Juniper MX Series routers, a Huawei WiMAX access service network gateway and approximately 10 HP servers at its core.

The hub sites use Huawei base station technology and Juniper J Series site routers.

Power One will supply cabinets, power supplies and battery equipment for the base stations. The base stations could run under battery for between six and eight hours.

Vendor agreements for the network operations centre were still "under negotiation", the company said.

Unwired chief executive David Spence confirmed there were plans to roll out the network to other Australian cities but said it hadn't been decided "which city [was] next".

He said that it was likely Vividwireless would re-use the tower infrastructure of Unwired's existing 2.5G network in Sydney and Melbourne.

Spence also said the plan was to retire the Unwired network in approximately "two-to-three years... and transfer the customers across [to Vividwireless] if we can".

Unwired had already secured "a number of sites" for Vividwireless base stations in Perth. Crown Castle would supply around one-third of the hub base station sites, with the remaining number to be sourced from "independents".

Construction work had already commenced on several sites.

Juniper's director of service providers in Australia and New Zealand, Alex Krawchuk, praised Vividwireless as "the first network investment [announced] since the NBN.

"With some clarity coming out of the NBN, I think [future] regulatory reform will give more certainty to ISPs and unlock investments," Krawchuk said.