Wireless broadband infrastructure vendor IPWireless Inc. finally has something meaningful to shout about following multimillion-dollar deals with carriers AtlasONE Malaysia Sdn Bhd. and Airdata AG (see Malaysians Deploy IPWireless).

The wins deliver a much-needed credibility boost for the vendor after months of claimed "imminent" contracts that overshadowed last year’s initial win with New Zealand’s Walker Wireless (see IPWireless's Stuck Record and IPWireless Walks New Zealand).

The AtlasONE deal is valued at $180 million, a project that will see the Malaysian startup roll out broadband wireless services on the 2.5GHz band to a potential subscriber base of 500,000 by 2005. In clinching the deal, the vendor’s marketing director Mark Pittick claims to have seen off “all the usual suspects.” Likely competitors would have included Flarion Technologies, Navini Networks Inc., and ArrayComm Inc..

Analysts believe the win is significant, but point out the gulf in stature between a broadband wireless deal and a typical Tier 1 3G contract. “It is one of the largest commercial broadband wireless deployments to date, although if you compare it to a 3G or cellular deal it is probably small potatoes,” comments Emmy Johnson, principal analyst at Sky Light Research.

The vendor also revealed to Unstrung a commercially deployed contract win with Germany’s Airdata. The deal is yet to be publicly announced, but Pittick states that the project is of a similar financial ilk to the Malaysian win.

“Airdata is in the process of rolling out services in Stuttgart, and their intention is to cover 70 percent of the country,” he adds. “They want to wait until they have covered the majority of Germany before announcing it.”

Despite its success, neither deal is the Tier 1 triumph the vendor has been promising for as long as Unstrung can remember [ed. note: about ten minutes, then].

Not that this stops Pittick from waxing lyrical on future plans. “We are about to announce a bigger deal in the next four weeks in Europe, and another one in the Americas shortly after that,” claims the marketing man. “And some major mobile names towards the latter part of Q3 and into Q4, which we hope will lead to a domino effect.”

But will those be small potato dominos?

— Justin Springham, Senior Editor, Europe, Unstrung