LONDON – Mobile InfraTech – Broadband wireless vendor ArrayComm Inc. is trialing its iBurst service in Oxford, England, as it attempts to build on earlier Australian success, Unstrung has learned.

Earlier this week ArrayComm’s first commercial iBurst customer, Personal Broadband Australia Pty. Ltd. (PBBA), extended its service to the cities of Brisbane, Canberra, and Melbourne, following an initial launch in Sydney last March (see ArrayComm Touts Sydney Trial, iBurst Launches in Oz, and ArrayComm Goes Live in Oz). [Ed. note: We understand Cocklebiddy is still waiting.]

“We offer speeds of 1 Mbit/s per user,” PBBA’s CEO, Jim Cooney, told a conference today. “We are moving to 2 Mbit/s in the next six to nine months, and beyond that we’ll see 4 to 8 Mbit/s in the next two to three years... We will cover 75 percent of the [Australian] population and 90 percent of businesses.”

Cooney then casually let slip the fact that ArrayComm has the U.K. firmly in its sights.

“Internationally, Australia is up and running. A trial was conducted in France last year, and South Africa is building a network that’s ready for launch [see ArrayComm Bursts into SA]. Trials are also underway in the U.K. and the U.S.A. where there is significant national interest. In fact, this morning I logged onto the first iBurst base station in the U.K. which is currently operational in Oxford.”

ArrayComm declines to comment on the Oxford deployment. "We're keeping our lips sealed on that one," says director of marketing Steven Glapa.

The iBurst system uses “unpaired," or time-division duplex (TDD), technology that allows one communications channel to be used for both upstream and downstream traffic. In contrast, frequency-division duplex (FDD), the flavor used by the major 3G systems such as UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System), uses two separate channels for sending traffic back and forth. This makes it somewhat of a spectrum glutton compared with TDD.

— Justin Springham, Senior Editor, Europe, Unstrung