Telstra's BigPond has hit back at criticisms levelled at its new wireless broadband service, saying that the services offered by its competitors lack coverage and reliability.

Last Friday, BigPond announced the rollout of its wireless broadband service, which is based on the CDMA mobile phone network. The new service offers both desktop modem and mobile laptop card versions and provides download speeds of up to 256kbps or 512kbps in metropolitan Sydney and selected areas of other cities and regional centres, depending on the chosen plan. The laptop version automatically switches to Internet download speeds of 80-100 kbps when outside a broadband coverage zone, provided the user is within Telstra's CDMA coverage area.

The announcement prompted immediate criticism from wireless broadband rival Unwired, which announced on the same day a $37 million investment from Intel to enable the company to expand its network beyond Sydney. Unwired CEO David Spence pointed out that BigPond's service was underpowered offering only a maximum 512/64 kbps connection speed compared with Unwired's 1024/128 kbps premium service. Spence also pointed to BigPond's expensive pricing which, with usage penalties of 15c per MB for wireless fixed modems and 30c per MB for laptop cards, make the BigPond service several times the cost of equivalent services from Unwired or iBurst service providers for average users who download more than 1G of data per month.

After reading our story, BigPond's corporate affairs manager, Ross Middleton, contacted us to exercise the company's right of reply:

"What else would you expect Unwired to say about our product?" asked Middleton rhetorically.

"Unwired saying we are underpowered? Unwired is hugely underpowered in Melbourne , Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, Hobart, Perth, Darwin, Newcastle, Wollongong, Albury, Launceston, Geelong, Ballarat, Moree, Cairns, Coolangatta, Noosa, Surfers Paradise, Townsville, Maroochydore and all areas non-Sydney-Metro.

"But honestly, cost comparisons with providers who basically only sell bandwith, with limited geographic coverage, and no content or bundling opportunities, are irrelevant."

In his communication to us, Middleton also cast doubt on the reliability of the iBurst service.

The true test, however, will come about 12 months down the track. If at that stage, BigPond leads the market in wireless broadband, then the users will have decided that the big carrier has the best service overall. If BigPond does not clearly lead the wireless broadband space, despite all of its marketing muscle, infrastructure and resources, then it had better get serious about providing wireless users with a full strength broadband service at affordable prices. The problem with that, however, is that BigPond also offers broadband users a competing product called ADSL.

Related story: BigPond launches costly wireless broadband using CDMA