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Domain: optushome.com.au
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Comments · 52
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Cable, now in .au
You're forgetting that Optus@Home and BigPond Advance now have cable services serving the cities on the east coast of Australia.
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Re:What is up with Australia?Telstra is behaving like a typical monopoly at the moment. In areas where they don't face competition they charge like a wounded bull so as to maximise profit while they can. As competition is introduced this changes, and they drop their prices, and introduce new services.
The cable situation in Australia is interesting. Initially cable was laid by Optus to give them access to the local loop so they could totally bypass Telstra. At the moment Telstra owns the local loop and other telcos don't have access to it, so Telstra gets a slice of every call made in Australia that involves a fixed line phone.
To protect its Telephony business Telstra rolled out cable to pretty much exactly the same places Optus did.
Both Telstra and Optus laid digital cable, with the aim of providing phone, internet and pay TV services on the cable. Optus made a lot of hoopla about 20c local phone calls across their cable network, but ran into technical problems and IIRC only in recent times has voice over cable worked for them. They had some similar problems with their cable internet service, which has been in beta for over a year. Telstra have never tried to carry voice traffic on their cable network -- they don't need to because they have the local loop.
Cable in Australia is about to change with Optus@home, a partnership between Optus and @home. They will be offering a cable internet service targeted at home and small businesses, with prices more competitive than those offered by Telstra.
AAPT are introducing satellite soon, which will also add pressure to the high bandwidth internet market.