Optus to spend $150m rolling out 340 DSLAMs

Stuart Corner
Friday, 23 September 2005 10:00

Business IT - Networking

Optus has announced its long-expected DSLAM rollout, saying it will invest $150 million to install its own DSLAMs in 340 Telstra exchanges.

These will enable it to serve 2.9 million households and business off its on network, in addition to the 1.4 million passed by the Optus hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) pay TV network. Earlier this year Optus named Huawei as its preferred DSLAM supplier but has held off committing to a rollout saying it wanted regulatory concessions in return for making the necessary investment and boosting competition.

Optus says it expects to launch services on the new network by the end of the year and to have rolled out to almost 100 exchanges by April 2006.

The service will require the use of Telstra's unconditioned local loop, but Optus has yet to reach commercial agreement with Telstra for this. Optus CEO, Paul O'Sullivan, said: "Despite many months of negotiations, Telstra has refused to provide a price for the ULL service that we consider commercially fair. Therefore we will shortly be lodging an access dispute with the ACCC. But we will not let this delay our launch date."

O'Sullivan said that, in addition to the DSLAM rollout plans announced today, Optus was further developing its 'Bridge to Broadband' proposal to align with the Government's recently announced 'Connect Australia' package.

Optus currently has 406,000 broadband subscribers, 419,000 dial-up internet users and more than 1.1 million residential telephony customers. It launched OptusNet DSL, its ADSL service delivered by reselling Telstra's service, in 2004 and today claims to be Australia's largest DSL reseller with 162,000 subscribers.