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What is the Wireless Broadband Alliance?

According to Telstra, it's something it did with four major telcos to form an Asian wireless broadband alliance aimed at business travellers. NextWeb says it's something it's set up with two Southern Californian carriers, again aimed at business customers. Is it a trend? Will it be one?

The smaller scale deal is the three California firms which sell wireless high-speed Internet services. They say they have formed an alliance "in the hope of better competing against the telecommunications and cable giants that currently rule the broadband market."

In other words, this is a mobile-customer target, not a way of providing wired broadband replacement. The same seems to apply to the Asian alliance: Telstra has joined with Korea Telecom, China Netcom Corp, Malaysia's Maxis Communications Berhad and Singapore's StarHub - all aimed at the mobile traveller.

The details are all available in the official Telstra/Maxi announcements - but the analysis that matters is that these people are all suddenly aware of the single biggest truth about WiFi - that it has to be cheap.

And the only way of making it cheap, is for one ID to be valid almost everywhere. One season ticket has to cover all destinations; one SIM card has to fit in the same user's PC, phone, and PDA, and office and home systems.

The question that can't be answered, yet, is this: Can the telcos get together, quickly enough, to fend off the rising tide of private networks, doing it for nothing.