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Leap Broadband was responding to an order by Etain Doyle, the Telecom Regulator, which has deregulated the fixed-wireless access (FWA) broadband market, removing barriers to entry into the market.
Rory Ardagh, a director of Leap Broadband has called on the Minister for Communications and Natural Resources, to reverse the ODTR's order. Claiming that a deregulated market will not provide the return-on-investment required by new entrants to invest in equipment and to realise economies of scale. He has also called upon Minister Dermot Ahern to provide wireless licenses to new entrants, to ensure the development of a healthy fixed-wireless broadband market in Ireland.
Ardagh is also seeking an inquiry by the Competition Authority into the actions of the ODTR in allowing Eircom and Chorus to "hoard" the licences that they already have, without actually making wireless broadband widely available. "Eircom and Chorus have six broadband wireless licences," Ardagh claimed in a statement, "But have failed to roll-out a useful service. As a consequence, market competition and broadband are not being developed as originally promised."
Leap Broadband currently provides fixed-wireless broadband with a basic telecoms licence, rather than a wireless licence.
Since local phone service providers and cable television providers are in the best position to provide wired broadband services, new entrants to the broadband market have looked to wireless access as the best way to provide competing broadband services to homes and small businesses.
"In a protected market environment we could use higher bandwidth equipment and a provide a greater guaranteed range," said Ardagh while speaking to ElectricNews.Net. "Our current equipment can provide a range of up to five kilometres, but in a protected market we could provide up to 8MB/s over a range of 17 kilometres."
Ardagh believes that better equipment and greater range would allow Leap to realise economies of scale and to provide wireless access at a lower cost to consumers and to compete with wired broadband. "Nobody will benefit from this decision, it's effectively a fixed-wireless broadband wasteland scenario," he said.
The decision by the ODTR is in contrast to that of UK authorities, who are currently engaged in the licensing process for 3.5GHz wireless access. Since wireless traffic requires discrete frequencies, the order specifies that all base-stations providing FWA services must be registered with the ODTR, which it says will enable operators deploying the equipment to co-operate with each other using the available frequency.
Ardagh dismissed the ODTR's idea of co-operation among competing operators to share frequencies as "a fantasy."
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