Stuart Corner
Monday, 10 November 2008 09:08
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
First up was Milne, who prefaced his colleagues' presentations by saying: "All three of us will be referring to this word 'media comms', our media comms strategy, and that means more, much more than simply pushing content down pipes. It means creating value for consumers by doing things that no-one else can do.
"For a start it means understanding our consumers better thanks to the insights of market-based management. It means assembling entertaining consumer content, useful search and directory information, as well as applications that boost business productivity.
And it means having the fastest and of course the most ubiquitous broadband networks." (my italics).
OK, so we get the message: Fast, ubiquitous broadband is key to Telstra's strategy. But nowhere in the day long event was NBN factored in: not in the presentations from business unit heads; not in financials, not in the guidance.
As CFO John Stanhope said, in response to questions: "If there is a NBN decision, if we choose to file, and if we are awarded or whatever, we would then have to do another update in terms of what we would see as the requirements, given whatever the NBN decision might be."
Meantime, Telstra is pushing ahead very aggressively to extract the maximum possible data speeds from its Next G network, demonstrating 21Mbps at the event, promising 42Mbps next year and 84Mbps beyond that, ahead of the next big leap forward to LTE at 100Mbps plus.
Last week
iTWire reported the CEO of one of Telstra's key suppliers, Sierra Wireless stressing just how hard Telstra was pushing to these higher speeds ahead of any other network operator in the world. And at the investor day, Mike Wright, executive director of Telstra Wireless, emphasised that there was much more to this than simply the radio technology.
"A wireless network needs much more than base stations...There's no point having a fast wireline network if it doesn't connect to an equally fast and robust backhaul network, that can carry all the speed-hungry and data-hungry requirements of a broadband-enabled community.
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