I blogged earlier in the week about the looming fight over how radio spectrum suitable for WiMax wireless broadband services should be carved up among the industry players keen to get hold of them (Looming fight for the airwaves).
Well, on the eve of the Telecommunications UsersAssociation's conference in Wellington, it seems communications minister David Cunliffe may have proposed a solution that will allow all players, Vodafone and Telecom, to participate, but ensure the smaller players can't be priced out of the market.
After listening to industry submissions, Cunliffe has apparently decided to hold an auction in December of both 2.3GHz (gigahertz) spectrum and 2.5GHz spectrum. Importantly, no one player will be able to buy more than one 30MHz block of spectrum. The Government will also reserve some spectrum to run a "managed park" that can be used for geographically limited wireless networks. Councils, community broadband groups or iwi could step in here to offer services.
Malcolm Dick of WiMax operator CallPlus told me he is "delighted" with this decision, because the one block will be sufficient to run WiMax services, at least until more bandwidth-hungry services like IPTV become more pervasive.
"While the government is not going to block the incumbents from entering the auction as we requested, they have solved the issue we raised by widening the spectrum available and only allowing each party to bid for one block," Dick told me.
More details will no doubt emerge during the conference tomorrow, but the early details suggest a pragmatic solution has been found on what was gearing up to be a pretty divisive issue.
