UK Broadband has denied reports that it has abandoned
a nationwide roll-out of its wireless broadband service using the 3.4GHz spectrum
it mostly won in an auction in June 2003.
The company, a fully owned subsidiary of Hong Kong telecom group PCCW, soft
launched a service offering 512kbit/s in the Thames Valley in May of this year,
dubbed Netvigator, and has been running trials elsewhere in the UK.
However, a report in the Financial Times Thursday (Nov 25) suggested the company
had decided it would be too costly to roll out the service to all parts of the
UK.UK Broadband said it is still evaluating a number of rollout scenarios,
ranging from coverage in one area to offering a service to about 75 per cent
of UK households.
It denied it had ever committed to full wireless broadband coverage, even
though in 2003 it spent a reported $14 million acquiring all 15 of the regional
broadband licences put up for auction by the then Radiocommunications Agency,
which is now a part of the communications-to-media industry regulator Ofcom.
It won 13 of the 15 regional licences outright, and subsequently bought out
the two other winners to gain a virtual monopoly in offering broadband fixed
wireless using the 3.4GHz frequency across the country.
The heavily scaled-back investment plans by PCCW would ensure that BT maintains
a stranglehold on the last-mile broadband connections to homes for some time.
Rival internet suppliers and Ofcom hoped that an aggressive roll-out of wireless
broadband to homes would have provided much-needed competition with BT's network.
Analysts have estimated that a nationwide roll-out of the service would cost
up to $1 billion. It is believed PCCW has invested up to $40 million to cover
300,000 households in the Thames Valley.
At the time of the licence auction PCCW faced little competition, partly because
rivals were deterred by the potentially high costs of a large-scale roll-out
of the service.
PCCW is now saying it plans to follow a prudent, step-by-step approach. It told
the FT the company "favors continuing its phased approach to roll-out, after
evaluating the market environment in the UK and studying the learnings of the
initial soft launch period."
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