Telstra's massive Broadband Connect funded ADSL plan

Stuart Corner
Monday, 15 January 2007 05:09

IT Industry - Strategy

Telstra is offering to provide ADSL at up to 8Mbps to an additional 1590 exchange in regional and rural Australia in return for the entire $600 million available under the Broadband Connect programme.

According to Telstra this would make fixed broadband available to 95 percent of the population, up from 91 percent today. It is a requirement of Broadband Connect that all services installed with its funding be available whole and Telstra has confirmed that this is part of its proposal.

In addition to ADSL enabling rural exchanges Telstra would upgrade some 1,029 large pair gain systems that currently prevent access to ADSL broadband services in some rural and regional areas. A number of towns are presently served only by radio backhaul systems and would require new optic fibre backhaul. Telstra said Birdsville and Windorah in Queensland, Marble Bar in WA, and Groote Eylandt in the NT would all require new fibre backhaul and that more than  800kms of additional optical fibre linking remote locations would be installed under the proposal. Telstra aims to complete the project by 2009.

The head of Telstra Country Wide, Geoff Booth said Telstra's plan was different to other proposals in that it concentrated on taking broadband to Australians who were mostly without a broadband service other than satellite. He said that the 8Mbps ADSL service would support videoconferencing services which could bring major improvements to healthcare and education services in rural Australia.

'"The single biggest benefit would be the ability to provide secure and affordable video conferencing so that many more people living in rural and remote areas could have access to the best health and education services available," according to Booth.