Kordia explains alliance with lame-dog Woosh

I had coffee with Emma Morrison from Kordia this morning, joined by Mike Parker from Nokia Siemens (a company usually associated most closely with Vodafone; more of which shortly).

READ ALSO: Newman resurfaces in $300m rural broadband tender

Kordia, with partners FX Networks and Woosh, is shortlisted for the government’s $300 million rural broadband initiative (RBI).

An RBI win would be sweetly timed for Kordia, with the new initiative due to kick in just as the state-owned company is set to lose revenue from one of its core businesses: transmitting analogue TV broadcasts (its raison d’etre back when it was part of TVNZ as BCL).

But why align with Woosh, a financial disaster area with a dead-end technology (IP Wireless)?

One word: spectrum.

A while back, I wrote that a white knight might step in to save Woosh, if only for its spectrum rights.

Kordia is not about to buy Woosh (one assumes), but Woosh’s 2300MHz spectrum does make it a useful partner.

Together, Woosh and Kordia have a 70MHz continuous spectrum block in the 2300MHz-2400MHz range, which could be deployed for a 4G network component of a rural broadband build (the third member of the partnership, FX, would roll out the fibre component).

The spectrum - which is licensed until 2030 - would be all FX/Kordia/Woosh would need to push ahead with the 4G cellular half of their rural broadband roll-out.

The consortium would not need to participate in the 700MHz "digital dividend" auction that will follow the digital TV switchover (althought Kordia could participate in any case).

Ms Morrison said that if Telecom and Vodafone participate in the 700MHz action and win, it was likely that sub-20MHz chunks would be available, while Kordia, combined with Woosh, already had juicy hunk of 70MHz 4G-friendly spectrum.

700MHz seems a much more suitable frequency for rural areas, because it has a much larger coverage radius, while 2300MHz has a shorter throw, but is better for penetrating obstacles such as walls and windows (as encountered most densely, of course, in urban areas).

But Mr Parker said the relatively short distances between the 4G/LTE towers and the rural homes - and, especially, the fact that homes would be equipped with booster antennas (not disimilar to Sky TV aerials) mean that 2300MHz would easily do the job. 

400 ready-made cellsites
Ms Morrison saw Kordia’s 400 radio and TV broadcast towers as another big advantage.

If Kordia’s consortium wins the rural tender, the 400 towers could pull double-duty as 4G/LTE cellsites, with only a few more locations needing to be added (Mr Parker though, off the top of his head, 50 to 100).

If it wins, “lights could be on by the middle of next year”, said Ms Morrison.

That Nokia Siemens double-up
Kordia promises to install booster antennas on rural homes that have a line-of-sight connection to a celltower.

This partly explains why Kordia/FX/Woosh can promise 10Mbit/s speed to 80% of rural homes (double the bandwidth required by the tender).

It also helps that a home is a fixed target, and thus easier to accommodate that, say a herd of rural dwellers milling around with cellphones at a school fair).

And while 4G/LTE (like HSPA+ or any cellular technology) can be used for boosting capacity as much as speed (that is, cramming more customers onto the same number of cellsites), transmitting to a fixed number of homes means a slice of 4G bandwidth (90Mbit/s in Mr Parker’s example) could be divided up in set, predictable fashion to provide each home with the promised 10Mbit/s.

The booster antenna idea is familiar. Vodafone, which is handling the cellular side of its combined bid with Telecom, has promised to deploy exactly the same technology.

And “exactly” really is the operative word here, as Nokia Siemens is the incumbent mobile infrastructure provider at Vodafone NZ, and has recently been pushing 4G/LTE presentations with that company too.

How does that work out?

Mr Parker explained that some Nokia Siemens staff work with Vodafone, others with Kordia.