WiMax has been a complete non-starter in Australia, especially considering that Telstra’s NextG network is pretty much the best HSPA network in the world. But that hasn’t stopped the Seven network from rolling out WiMax to Perth residents this month through a company called Vivid Wireless. The most surprising part is that the data limits are actually pretty competitive.
The plans start at $20 a month for 1GB of data, which is comparable to most of the HSPA wireless networks. But as you scale up the amount of data, the price becomes a lot more aligned with ADSL pricing – 40GB for $99 or 25GB for $75. If you exceed your monthly limit, you can purchase additional data, with 1GB costing $20 and 10GB costing $80.
Both uploads and downloads count towards your data limit, although being owned by the Seven network, Vivid Wireless does offer unmetered TiVo and Engin downloads. If you don’t want to spring the extra cash for extra data, you’ll be throttled to 64kbps.
While we’re discussing speeds, there’s no indication of how fast the network will actually be. The Vivid website claims they’ll update with “real world” speeds when they start collating data. That doesn’t help us now, though. There’s also no peak or off-peak times.
Any Perth Gizmodians had a play with this yet? I’m definitely interested in thoughts on the network’s performance…