Unwired begins $3m fibre broadband rollout

Australian fibre broadband provider Uecomm has won a five-year, $3 million contract to connect base stations for wireless specialist Unwired.
 
Unwired and Uecomm have signed a Master Services Agreement for stage one of the former's wireless broadband network.

As part of the December deal, Uecomm will interconnect Unwired's base stations to a point of aggregation at a Mascot data centre in Mascot.
 
David Spence, CEO at Unwired, said Unwired needed high-speed connectivity for its internet and voice services.

"We reviewed several vendors but Uecomm's solution impressed us the most as it was able to deliver connectivity to multiple locations. It helped tremendously that Uecomm had a presence in the locations we needed to be in," Spence said.

Spence said the Sydney rollout, covering 2,500 square kilometres, would enable customers to connect wirelessly from homes and offices using Uecomm's Ethernet virtual LAN (VLAN) connections and a 500Mb/s fibre link.

Unwired is planning stages two and three of its networking rollout to cover other metropolitan areas and regional Australia. Services provision for those stages would also go out for tender, Spence said.

"That will enable us to put a whole network in place and hopefully when we launch it this year everything will work. We're pretty confident," Spence said. "We've had to build it all from scratch."

Brendan Park, products and marketing director of at Uecomm said the deal would help promote it as a "carrier's carrier".

Park said Unwired needed a reliable, scalable network that could carry a large amount of data and 24-hour support. The deployment was expected to go live by mid-2004, he said.