The Galician firm Softgal (Software Services of Galicia) has been the successful bidder to win A Estrada Dixital’s telecommunications network for 567.000 euros. According to La Voz de Galicia (The Voice of Galicia, a local newspaper), the offer includes both wimax and mesh in order to cover the whole town of A Estrada. Wimax will be implemented in the distribution network, to which 12 wi-fi links will be hooked, apart from the other 20 links that will cover the town centre.
In the USA, AOL will sell the wimax of Clearwire, which is the company that bought the Spanish Aló a couple of months ago. The new service will be launched under the name of “AOL High Speed”, and will stand as direct competition against ADSL and cable. During the first phase, the service will only be available in California and Florida and its minimum price will be 26 dollars per month.
Electric companies always looked to telecommunications out of the corner of their eyes. In the past, Endesa, Fenosa and Iberdrola (Spanish companies) invested in operators like Airtel, Auna, Euskaltel or Neo. Their businesses are very similar: to manage a network and offer services through it.
Wimax reaches the Mahgreb. Smart Link Communication has installed a wireless network in Algeria, which is so big, that it needs this kind of infrastructures to manage to offer broadband connections in all the country. Wimax will be implemented to give access to the Internet and to IP phone services.
The French operator Free is preparing a nationwide wimax offer, which will be the first of its kind in the world. The announcement is very important because Free is an ADSL company that offers IP phone services to its clients with Internet access as well.
This is the year of wireless connections to the Internet. Wi-fi and wimax are no longer two incipient technologies; they’ve become real alternatives to cable and ADSL. The generalisation of the use of VoIP also makes them cheaper than mobile phones when it comes to offering phone services.
The North American company GigaBeam has patented the ‘WiFibre’, a wireless technology that reaches speeds of 1Gbps. It will allow to transmit videos of 90 minutes in less than 6 seconds; its power is already building dreams about all kind of applications.
The Wimax Forum, the organization in charge of gathering the main companies devoted to wimax, has appointed Cetecom (Telecommunications Technology Centre), the laboratory settled in Malaga, Spain, and Aeroflex to develop new systems that help analyse the accordance of the mobile wimax hardware (the standard 802.16e). The first device they will analyse is a base station emulator.
“The Implications of WiMAX for competition and regulation”. This is the title of an extended report that the OECD has just released, even though it was written in June of 2005. This 60 pages long analysis devotes most of its paragraphs to deal with the conditions in which governments must authorise the use of appropriate frequencies. Spain is barely reflected, apparently, because the Spanish government didn’t provide de Organization with data.
I’ve learned from BlogTelecom that there is a new organization (it isn’t a company) which is installing wimax aerials in Spanish cities. It is called stbnet and it is installing hotspots in Alicante. It aims at offering both broadband Internet access and IP phone services. The domain is under Stephan Bergmann’s name, who, according to Google, is also linked to OWS (Orange Web Services), an Internet supplier in Crevillent (Alicante).