Unanswered questions about NSW Education's $280m Telstra contract - UPDATED

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 22 November 2009 07:34

Opinion and Analysis

NSW minister of education Verity Firth announced on Friday 20 November an agreement with Telstra that she promised would "revolutionise the delivery of digital education to all public schools and TAFE institutes," but neither she, nor Telstra were keen to elaborate.  This article has been updated - see at end for additional information.
Firth said the contract was worth $280m over four years, was "the largest of its type in Australia" and would "bring the benefits of improved broadband services to more than 1.2 million students at over 2,400sites state-wide."

She reported Telstra as saying "the network will be the largest in Australia and one of the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere." And she said: "more than 4,500 kilometres of optic fibre would be rolled out under the initiative, which would improve the speed and reliability of digital learning to school and TAFE students and create 150 jobs."

The story went around world within hours, even being reported by the Wall Street Journal! None of these reports added any substantial new information to the minister's press release and the curious thing was that, despite Telstra supposedly saying the network would be the largest in Australia and one of the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere," not only did Telstra not issue its own press release it did not even put a press contact on the minister's release. It did add the minister' release to the press release section of its web site, but does not appear to have distributed it though its usual channels - iTWire never received it.

All of which leads your sceptical scribe to the conclusion that there is more (or, rather much less) to this story than meets the eye. iTWire's calls on Friday the minister's press office and to Telstra both went unanswered.

So here are some of the questions that we would have liked to get answered. First of all there's that "4500kms of optical fibre". Now do they mean fibre, or cable? Fibre counts in a typical cable are well above 100, so if that's fibre it equates to about 30kms of cable.

Are we being overly sceptical? Maybe, but if they really were going to lay 4500km of fibre cable for this project you'd have thought they would be keen to tell us which schools or TAFEs, if any, were going to get it. After all the NSW Government needs every bit of voter support it can get right now. Perhaps this fibre is deeper in the network and part of Telstra's general network expansion plans?

Which brings us to the second question. "The network will be the largest in Australia." By what comparison? What exactly is this 'network'? What bandwidth does it deliver to each school? Using what technology? Without giving some answers to those questions the statement is meaningless and not worth repeating by any self-respecting journalist.

 Again the contract, (rather than the network) is supposedly "the largest of its type in Australia." But what type of contract is it? And importantly what does it replace? What services does Telstra provide as part of the contract (Internet access, filtering, email, etc, etc)? What broadband services do the schools and TAFEs have at present? Who is providing them? What do they cost? Will this contract save the Government money or cost it money?

Contrast this lack of information with what Telstra said in July when it was awarded a $146m two year contract for a network to serve 1550 Catholic Schools nationwide. Telstra issued a press release saying: "The network, which is predominantly fibre-based, will connect five data centres across Australia and use Telstra Internet Direct, which provides carrier-grade connectivity and means schools will avoid the risk of congestion configuration issues. Management of the network will be handled through a range of virtual private networks and gateway exchanges, enabling Catholic Education Offices to share and exchange resources across Australia." Telstra Internet Direct is a standard service, full details of which can be found on Telstra's web site.

Telstra is also playing a major role in the provision of broadband services to Victorian schools. In November 2008, Victorian premier, John Brumby, Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo and education minister Bronwyn Pike announced that all Victorian Government schools would have their broadband access upgraded from four to 10Mbps.

UPDATE
Telstra has informed us that the press release was sent to one of my colleagues and that the Telstra spokesperson I callled had in fact left the company some weeks earlier (I called his mobile and the message gave no indication that he was no longer with Telstra).

As to the NSW Government Education Department contract: Telstra says by Septermber of  2010 it will have rolled out fire to nearly every public school and TAFE college in NSW, more than 2400 sites, and this will require they laying of some  4500 kilometres of fibre optic cable, making the network "The largest fully fibre based network for a single customer in Australia."

Telstra will supply an end to end broadband service over the fibre at bandwidths ranging from 4Mbps to up to 100Mbps, which can be changed based on the varying educational needs of the schools.