Vividwireless says the new networks wil be installed in densely populated areas of about 1.25 million people within five kilometres of selected universities in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide and Brisbane.

Specifically, these are Sydney University, the University of NSW and UTS University in Sydney; Melbourne University & RMIT); The Australian National University in Canberra, the University of Queensland in Brisbane and the University of Adelaide. The new networks will cover 471 square kilometres in total.

Vividwireless CEO, Martin Mercer, said: "The inner-city networks will form the base from which we can expand the coverage of the Vividwireless service to outer-lying areas in the future. The extension of the service will also allow Seven Network to further strengthen its digital platform connecting broadband users to the Internet and burgeoning multimedia solutions."

Mercer added: "We are delighted with the speed and ease with which we have established our Perth operation, which we believe will take the city by storm with our affordable pricing and very fast broadband speeds.

"Our research shows there is very strong appetite amongst computer users for very fast speeds and wireless access and we are very confident of achieving strong market shares among business people, students, professionals and people in the home."

The company is set to launch services on its first network, in Perth, next month with 150 base stations. It announced plans for the network and named its main suppliers late last year.

iTWire has been unable to obtain comment from Vividwireless on which, if any of its incumbent suppliers will be used for the network extension. However its main network infrastructure supplier, Huawei, has today announced a new base station, called SingleRAN@Broad, that it says, "will accommodate the tremendous increase in mobile broadband traffic, reduce the per-bit cost by over 95 percent."

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This product is an evolution of that bought by Huawei for its Perth network and which, as iTWire reported at the time could be 'switched over' to HSPA or LTE, because it is based on software defined radio technologies.

The chairman of Vividwireless, Ryan Stokes, confirmed this flexibility when he announced the $14 million extension of the service, to commence in the second half of 2010, at today's Broadband and Beyond Conference in Sydney. "Through our choice of vendor in Huawei we have the ability to convert to LTE or remain WiMAX in the future, that option is a soft upgrade."

He added: "We are very confident of success in Perth. As such we will continue the deployment into inner-city markets across Australia. With the next stage we are being very careful to target densely populated inner-city areas and early adopters of technology."