Airspan says Aussie ISP cut corners in WiMAX network

There’s a dust up brewing down under, where comments from the CEO of an Australian ISP that WiMAX technology was a “miserable failure” supported only by “opportunistic hype” drew a quick and acerbic response from its network equipment supplier, Airspan. The company contends the ISP cut corners when it set up its WiMAX network and made promises to customers it had no way of keeping.
 
Garth Freeman, CEO of Hervey Bay’s Buzz Broadband, opened–and has since closed–a WiMAX network he said had poor line-of-sight performance, latency problems and woeful indoor penetration.
 
Airspan said it was no surprise–Buzz set up the network on the cheap. “In the case of Buzz Broadband, we know that there were significant under-provisioning issues in the core network which connected the Airspan equipment to the internet,” said an Airspan spokesperson. “Very early in the relationship, Airspan technical services determined that Buzz’s backhaul network was considerably under-dimensioned–again to save cost–and lacked sufficient quality of service, and that these factors were the direct cause of VoIP-quality issues in the network.”
 
Grant Stepa, Airspan managing director is Australia, told ZDNet yesterday that Buzz “made no attempt whatsoever to follow our course of action” to improve the network, adding the two companies no longer are on speaking terms.

For more:
- Read about Garth Freeman’s tirade in CommsDay
- And ZDNet’s article
 
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