How Telstra could use WLL to kill the ULL

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 19 August 2007 15:27

Opinion and Analysis

Telstra's customer access network, aka 'local loop,' aka 'copper in the ground', is both a great asset and a great liability. Here's one way of bypassing it altogether in rural Australia. The copper is a great asset because it goes into almost every dwelling and place of business in Australia. And, thanks to DSL technology, it can deliver not only telephony but a myriad of services that require bandwidths of millions of bits per second.

And it's a great liability because pretty much whatever Telstra wants to do with it, the regulator the ACCC orders it to allow its competitors to do the same. What's more the ACCC tells Telstra what it can charge them for the privilege.

Telstra's protracted battle over regulatory relief from its proposed FTTN rollout has been one front on which Telstra has waged, and continues to wage, a determined battle to turn this liability into a new monopoly asset.

Another facet of its dilemma has been its refusal to offer ADSL2+ services capable of delivering bandwidth up to 20Mbps from any exchange where one of its competitors is not already doing so (If Telstra were first in it would be required to provide this service wholesale to its competitors).

What Telstra aspires to is a universal high speed network that it either does not have to share with its competition or that it can do so only on its own terms. In urban areas FTTN (as Telstra wants to roll it out) would be the ideal solution. Second best choice is the HFC network, and Telstra has just announced plans to upgrade a large portion of that to carry data at 30Mbps.

Elsewhere there is Next G. As I wrote recently Telstra is believed to have scrapped a plan to used technology from Australian company, Extel that would have extended the range of ADSL to 20 kms from the exchange in favour of using Next G, but there could be much more to this.