Vividwireless: we'll have true 4G first

Vividwireless will be offering "true" 4G services to east coast Australian customers years before the big telcos, chief executive officer Martin Mercer has claimed.

Spectrum in the 700MHz and 2.5GHz bands that may be sold off to the likes of Telstra, Vodafone and Optus in the digital dividend to use for 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) network services will not be enough to cope with consumer demand for high speed mobile broadband, according to Mercer.

He told an industry audience at the Communications Day Summit in Sydney yesterday that if the telcos each get 40MHz of spectrum in each band, and choose to use Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) LTE technology, they will require twice the amount of spectrum as Time Division LTE (TD-LTE) technology because FDD requires paired channels.

Mercer said that Vividwireless, which trialed TD-LTE technology with Huawei in Sydney recently, would be better placed because it would be able to deliver 4G services on the east coast with the 90MHz of 2.3GHz spectrum and 90MHz of 3.4GHz spectrum it already has at its fingertips.

"So Vividwireless has four times today the capacity that Optus, Telstra and Vodafone could ever hope to have in an ideal world in 15 years time," he said. "So when we build an LTE network on the east coast way before 2015...we will have the fastest network in the country."

"We will have enough spectrum to deliver a consistent, reliable, affordable 4G wireless broadband service and it will be true 4G years before Optus, Telstra and Vodafone start rolling out 4G."

Telstra announced last month that it plans to roll out 4G mobile broadband services with Ericsson in metropolitan and select regional centres by the end of 2011, utilising the 1800MHz spectrum it had been using for its 2G services.

Optus and Vodafone have conducted trials of LTE technology but have yet to announce plans to implement any 4G services in the near future.

The Vividwireless chief yesterday reiterated his belief that 4G will ultimately become the primary connection most consumers use for the internet, even replacing fixed-line services.

"4G is soon going to become a primary service, rather than a complementary service. Unless [customers have] got demand for high bandwidth real-time applications into the home delivered to a large screen they'll probably be using wireless broadband as their primary service," he said.

Mercer said that with 4G as the primary service, fixed-line services such as that offered by the National Broadband Network would become the complementary service.