Telstra defiant in face of 'keep CDMA going' order

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 20 September 2007 17:06

IT Policy - Regulation

Shortly after Telstra announced the planned closure of the CDMA network the Government announced that it would, via the ACMA, audit the CDMA network to assess coverage and, when informed by Telstra that Next G coverage was equivalent to CDMA, audit Next G coverage to confirm this.

Throughout all her blustering about imposing licence conditions on Telstra to keep CDMA open, Coonan has made not one mention of whether she intends to follow this procedure - which could still enable Telstra to shut down CDMA on schedule - or impose a more stringent test of equivalence.

However the adequacy of the original process is highly questionable. In a Senate Estimates Committee hearing in May Giles Tanner, the ACMA's general manager, inputs to industry, told shadow communications minister Stephen Conroy that "The audit...is about 100 cells over a route of several thousand kilometres of the 3G network."

Under subsequent questioning from Conroy, Tanner revealed that the entire audit had been completed in just eight days and that coverage was not assessed in Tasmania, the Northern Territory and Western Australia - being the three most sparsely populated states in which coverage is most likely to be marginal.

Tanner was also unable to say how far the ACMA audit team had ventured into the bush from major highways.