Struggling telecoms company Woosh Wireless has been thrown a lifeline. It yesterday disclosed several of its high-profile shareholders had agreed to inject another $29.2 million, avoiding a cash crunch.
The Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall, Wellington's wealthy Todd family, US venture capitalist Clarity, and the Arab investor Kuwait Finance House are subscribing to debt that will convert into equity.
Just over $19.2 million of the cash has been received; $10 million more is due in February. Exact terms of the injection are still to be resolved.
It seems Woosh has just received $29m worth of financial bailing out. This comes shortly after it announced it's VoIP service, which was apparently supposed to generate a lot of interest and threaten our good old incumbent telco. At that point, I really hoped it would give the incumbent a bit of cause for concern, because the Telco industry over here really needs a shakeup, but alas it seems it's not to be.
However I'm guessing it's not surprise to anyone who's used any of Woosh's services. A while back, our office used to use a Wireless connection from Woosh, and (this was back a few years, when they were still known as "Walker Wireless") they were completely useless. Their technical staff were incompetent and awful on the phone - which might not have been a big deal, if it wasn't for the amount of time the service simply stopped working for hours at a time in the middle of of the day. Add to that stories from a few friends who signed up for their "unlimited data transfer" deals, only to be told that Woosh actually had their own formula which they used to determine that "unlimited data transfer" actually equated to ~7gb. Methinks their dictionary might have been a wee bit outdated there, but never mind.
I still wish Woosh (heh) the best of luck. Telco competition here is only going to be a good thing for consumers, however rather than talk about it's cash burn rate, operational expenditure figures and other such things, perhaps it should focus on improving the quality of it's service and let word of mouth do the rest?
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