Unwired, Engin and Seven: A perfect threesome? – The future predicted. Part 3.

With the likely that Unwired shareholders accept the deal on offer from Seven’s network investment body, the new news that we see is that there is discussions with Seven and Austar over the possibility of Austar’s spectrum in regional areas being sold to Seven, or the possibility of a JV with Austar being done to give national deployment of a WiMAX network.

The news is in an ASX announcement by Seven’s Network body which states that they wish to deploy WiMAX, and to do that they plan to buy all shares and remove UNW from the ASX, thereby making it a private body (public through parent companies perhaps).

WiMAX deployments require a fair bit of capital, and then the returns can’t be guaranteed due to the fact competition exists, like Optus and Virgin (can’t really call Telstra competition, when the prices are set at levels that make them a clear loser).

This could however, give rise to regulatory concerns surrounding Seven’s investment in WiMAX which would result in Seven having monopoly control over a WiMAX network.

One is able to assume however, that Seven won’t be running the company at a loss like Unwired have been for some time (a loss, but a decreasing loss), but the same assumption would apply that the pricing on wholesale access would be at FAIR levels, and not the completely unreasonable levels seen from Telstra.

Seven would obviously leverage the benefit of being a TV content producer, a WiMAX network, Engin’s Internet Connectivity, VoIP and Seven & Engin’s TiVo import to offer a vertically integrated product lineup.

However, they may keep much of the buyout seperate, and save the brand names as well as offer a bundle seperately.

They would be offering a very unique product to the market, one which might see Pay TV prices drop to acceptable levels too!

Enjoy!