Telstra's ACT exchange upgrade has ISPs fuming

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 04 March 2009 09:37

IT Industry - Market

John Lindsay, carrier relations manager at Internode, agreed saying "This is the first time it has happened where a reasonably large number of customers have been affected by it and the stakes are higher now [with ULL]."

Telstra's "FTTN by stealth"
He accused Telstra of "building fibre to the node by stealth" and claimed there was no reason that Telstra could not leave the copper in service to allow Internode and others to continue providing LSS and ULL based services. "Our reading of the regulation is that Telstra is obliged to provide LSS and ULL from that node location but Telstra flatly refuse to do that. Every attempt to get them to do so to date has met with failure." He added: "We are assessing our options [via the ACCC] at the moment."

He too was sceptical of Telstra's official response, saying: "Telstra has found a plausible way to give itself an exemption to its Standard Access Obligations. The losers here are retail customers who lose their affordable ADSL2+ service on June 1st 2009. They will have the difficult choice of spending $30 more to retain the speed or spending the same and dropping to 1.5Mbps and getting less downloads."

Lindsay added: "Telstra haven't addressed the question of why it is necessary to disconnect customers on ULLS and LSS fed from Deakin.... These customers will also lose the ability to access future IPTV services because Telstra's wholesale network does not support multicast. It is inconceivable that Telstra can't find less than 50 pairs of copper to continue to feed these customers."

Nor did he hold out any hope of being able to install DSLAMs external but connected to the new sub-exchange, saying "It is inevitable that gaining physical access to the Keltie St site MDF will prove next to impossible given that it is a commercial building. Telstra are running an experiment here trying to establish a precedent. It would seem the future of Telstra is hiding in the basements of office blocks."

Barr said: "We reserve our right to upgrade and improve the network," but added: "These sort of upgrades where ULL and LSS services are no longer available are rare."