Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Conroy for this question. Taking his questions in some sort of order, I too have seen some reports of the OECD, particularly the working party on telecommunications, which actually has a most favourable report on WiMAX. Its key finding says WiMAX:

… should allow for wireless data speeds of up to 40 Mbit/s over a distance of 10 kilometres using relatively inexpensive equipment. These same technologies could also offer faster data transfers to mobile devices than is possible over current third-generation mobile networks under certain conditions.

The report on WiMAX also concludes that WiMAX is a particularly suitable platform for regional broadband access and says:

WiMAX equipment could play a key role in providing long-range fixed-wireless connectivity in rural and remote areas as well as mobile connectivity over shorter distances.

I am very glad that Senator Conroy wants to hitch his wagon to the OECD’s opinion of WiMAX technology. Of course, in the Broadband Connect initiative that I announced this morning with the Prime Minister, together with a number of other measures which I will eventually be able to get to, it was very clear that rather than picking technologies we have a mix of technologies, including fibre, with over 15,000 kilometres of additional backhaul that is going to provide about a 30 per cent reduction in backhaul costs; the enabling of 426 ADSL exchanges that will immediately provide speeds of up to 20 megabits per second; and the wireless network, which is particularly suited to ensuring that you can actually take your laptop to the shed, if you happen to live on a farm, and be able to do something appropriate in running your business with the use of this technology.

I am also very pleased that Senator Conroy seems to suggest that this cutting-edge technology has not been adopted anywhere else. I remind Senator Conroy that in the United Kingdom, Urban Wimax, a London based operator, is selling up to 10-megabit symmetrical access to businesses and has plans to roll out across the UK; in Scandinavia, Danske Telecom in Denmark has approximately 10,000 WiMAX subscribers—the service beginning in large Danish cities, including Copenhagen; in the United States, the third-largest mobile company, Sprint, announced plans to deploy a WiMAX network to reach 100 million people by the end of 2008, covering the following large cities—Chicago, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, Washington DC, Austin, Dallas, Denver, Fort Worth, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Antonio and Seattle. WiMAX has been deployed in Africa and it has been deployed in Chile, where Telmex announced the commercial launch of its WiMAX network. It has been deployed in Europe, India and in China. So I stand by my claim that WiMAX technology is cutting-edge technology and the technology of choice of many comparable countries.