Johannesburg - Internet service provider MWeb has announced that it is starting a trial of Wimax in Gauteng and Cape Town.
Rudi Jansen, MWeb CEO, explains that the company has already applied, along with around 30 other companies, to telecoms regulator Icasa for spectrum to run a national Wimax network and that it is hopeful that this process will be complete before the end of the year.
In the meantime about 1 000 MWeb subscribers in northern Johannesburg, the East Rand, Soweto, in Gauteng and from the areas around N1 City, Plumstead and the Foreshore in Cape Town, will be part of trial.
Jansen explains that there are several objectives to the trial including understanding how the physical landscape will affect the signal and what issues there are around getting the data from the base stations to the MWeb network.
Getting broadband to the masses
He adds that with the base station in Soweto the company hopes to get a better understanding of how to target communities that have traditionally not had access to broadband internet access.
"If we want to make broadband a success then we need to broaden the base of potential customers and because of this, the high-site at Chris Hani-Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto is vitally important.
"Our experience from deploying a Wimax network in Namibia is that increased competition has a real effect in increasing the penetration of broadband. In this situation the local telco moved quickly to start deploying ADSL services once we had gone live with our network."
Jansen said MWEB will be trialling a number of uncapped connectivity options aimed at the consumer, small business and corporate markets, along with voice and video services. The products will include 384kilobits/second (kbps), 512 kbps and 1 024 kbps options and trialists will not pay for the service while it is still in test phase.
MWeb will be trialling the 802.16e Mobile Wimax standard with equipment from Wimax vendor Alvarion, which is the same company that has won a contract from Telkom to deliver Wimax technology.
