Telstra gears up for high bandwidth content services

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 03 June 2010 15:00

Business IT - Networking

Telstra has announced a number of initiatives that, it says, have nothing whatsoever to do with the expected rollout of the NBN, but will nevertheless leave it very well positioned to exploit the bandwidth of the NBN by hosting content at a very large number of points of presence close to customers.

These facilities will also have the intelligence to supplement content with other value-added services that could bring additional revenue to Telstra.

Telstra has announced plans to spend $14m building an initial 12 'network and media centres' around Australia over the next three to five years and has revealed that it has completed a new content delivery network with an initial nine nodes around Australia.

Telstra COO, Michael Rocca, said: "These network and media centres will give us a footprint that will allows us to put infrastructure closer to customers. This will allow them to have better real-time access to the content and services we offer. They will reduce latency, improve quality and allow us to reduce costs by reducing transmission costs."

He added: "When I say close to customers I mean at the ethernet aggregation points [ of Telstra's Next IP network]. We have 147 of these and if we wanted to put one at each aggregation point we have the flexibility to do that."

Rocca said the first, trial, network and media centre had been built in Telstra's Haymarket, Sydney, exchange, and the first production centre would go live in the Lonsdale exchange in Melbourne.

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