BigAir goes public to fund wireless expansion

The company is looking to raise up to AU$10 million, according to a statement. A prospectus has been lodged with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission relating to the company's Initial Public Offering.

The carrier's network in Sydney primarily services businesses and high-rise apartment buildings with a fixed wireless solution, and consists of around 13 base stations.

A Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service using wireless could be one of the applications that drives BigAir's revenues in future, said managing director Jason Ashton.

"We believe the growth opportunity in VoIP over wireless is significant," he said in the statement. "We are already providing commercial VoIP services to a number of customers and demand for this service is increasing."

In preparation for the listing, Big Air has beefed up its board and management team, adding several ICT industry veterans.

Joining the board as non-executive chairman will be Toby Tobin, co-founder of leading ICT law firm Gilbert & Tobin. Both Shane Allan (ex-CEO of carrier PowerTel) and Anne Lenagan (former executive director of Unilever Australia) will step aboard as non-executive directors.

Reflecting the company's recent acquisition of Veritel Wireless, which resells both Unwired's and Personal Broadband Australia's wireless broadband solutions, Veritel's co-founder Ivan Hurwitz will sit on BigAir's board as an executive director.

BigAir is currently migrating Veritel's 4,000 business and residential customers across to BigAir's network, according to the statement.

A wireless future?
BigAir's expansion comes as other, more traditional businesses are looking to expand their wireless broadband networks across the nation.

Pay-TV and dialup Internet Service Provider Austar last week confirmed it would rollout wireless broadband into regional centres based on the same technology used by Sydney carrier Unwired. In addition Melbourne-based ISP Chariot Internet yesterday said it would acquire Omninet, a carrier with infrastructure in metro and regional Victoria.

In both cases, the networks are based on the upcoming WiMax standard, which is expected to form the basis of most high-bandwidth wireless communications. BigAir has previously said its network has a migration path to the standard.

WiMax, the common name for the 802.16 wireless broadband standard, is an alternative to cable and DSL (digital subscriber line). Compared with the popular Wi-Fi protocol that works in short distances, WiMax is said to be able to operate up to 50km.

According to the WiMax Forum, 802.16 will provide fixed , nomadic, portable and, eventually, mobile wireless broadband connectivity without the need for direct line-of-sight with a base station.

Chariot's acquisition is just one of around a dozen in the last 18 months for the company, which claims to be the nation's eighth-largest ISP with around 180,000 customers.

Omninet claims to have 36 points of presence scattered throughout Victoria, servicing a number of major clients including Melbourne University, Northeast Water, South Gippsland Water Authorities and ISP Dragnet in Albury-Wodonga. It primarily uses Motorola's Canopy wireless broadband equipment.

Chariot said the acquisition would allow it to defeat the 'last-mile' problem where carriers have struggled with the prohibitive cost of bringing wired broadband directly to customers' premises.

"No longer will we be performance and cost bound by the restrictive nature of this 'last mile', which has historically been the exclusive domain only of the largest telco infrastructure providers," said the company's managing director Robert Horlin-Smith.

Earlier this month, wireless broadband provider Unwired accepted an AU$37 million investment from Intel, which will be used to expand the company's wireless broadband Internet service to more Australian cities.