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Australia's Telstra Requires Fibre Customers To Use Copper Telephone
daria42 writes "Progress is happening rapidly in Australia, with the country's government continuing to roll out a nation-wide fibre network. However, the country's major telco Telstra doesn't appear to have quite gotten the message. Releasing its first National Broadband Network fibre broadband plans today, the telco stipulated that fibre customers will still be forced to make phone calls over the telco's existing copper network. Yup, that's right — fibre to people's houses, but phone calls over the copper network. Progress."
Some cynical people might even suspect a plot here - our right wing party would love to bury the NBN and have been claiming that it'll be more expensive than ADSL services - perhaps Telstra wants to give them more ammunition, and muddy the waters at the same time?
Cemil.
Fiber requires external power for the lasers.
Traditional phones lines are powered by the telco so they'll work during a standard blackout.
Australians' do not require Telstra.
what is the point of a speed that fast with a download cap that small?
POTS infrastructure is fully depreciated, lines are self-powered and system is completely compatible with all existing equipment. Even if you put a fibre-based POTS system in every exchange you'd still need to keep the copper running for non-subscribers. Seems like a reasonable trade-off if they are taking the savings and using the capital to accelerate the roll-out of fibre internet.
Interested to hear from an actual telecom engineer about how hard/expensive it would be to update the exchanges.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Copper means no need for converters/change of instruments at client side AND a single power source. If the exchange has power, the phones work
Fiber needs power at more points
The important part here is that Telstra REQUIRE you to subscribe to a POTS service (via copper) in order to be able to subscribe to a fibre internet service. There is no 'internet only' option, nor a VoIP option. Most rational ISP's (there are several mentioned in the article) give discounts for bundling, but will still sell you a service without POTS or other voice service.
To my knowledge NBNCo is rolling out their own new fibre system to places which are not currently cabled for fibre. Including the original Tasmanian trial etc.
Telstra has their own fibre network which must be near 10 years old, using their own concentrator (correct term?) and their own modems. This older system is still of course fibre based (well to the street, I don't believe it is to the door)
If I recall, the Govt / NBNCo are trying to take a shortcut on wiring places up by using Telstras existing Bigpond infrastructure in locations they've already cabled up with fibre. I can only wildly speculate here but I'm pretty sure it's fibre to the street, not to the house. There would be significantly less fibre laid then 'proper' NBN installs.
So, seeing as the fibre doesn't come all the way to the house, they can't use the standard NBNCo equipment.
http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/images/hi-res/truck-02-hi-res.JPG (4.5mb)
So basically I'm guessing anyone put on the "Telstra version" of the NBN is basically just getting Telstra Bigpond cable, at new NBN prices and I (guess?) with all the speed caps removed for the modems.
I'm also going to guess, for the sake of saving even more money, rather than issue a mini UPS / replacement modem with VOIP built in (basically what NBN customers get) Telstra can't be bothered replacing this equipment and that explains the rule to stick with copper (likely free / subsidised) once the deal is agreed to.
I mean logically there's no reason "Telstra Fibre" (cable) customers couldn't just use a new, standardised piece of equipment which offers full VOIP, Battery backup and a highish quality modem which delivers decent (although sub fibre) speeds
This information is absoloute speculation but something along the lines of what I think is going on, if this is not the case and someone has a better clue (very likely) let me know where I went wrong. Regardless, I suspect money is the culprit behind this one and saving a hell of a lot of digging up places.
The Telstra wires are lead with paper insulation in my pit, and it's only a 30 minute walk to the centre of a state capital.
Because Telstra have a monopoly on some segments and close to a monopoly on others they can mazimise profit by doing as little as possible. They are an evil beast that screws over the customer the way that only a former government body that has picked only the worst aspects of private enterprise can do.
Telstra have a history of offering wholesale products at greater than retail pricing. They've enjoyed a monopoly position for so long they've forgotten how to compete.
The sad part is the number of customers they somehow manage to keep. I have no idea why there are so many stupid people out there. I think it's probably because they spend a lot of money on marketing.
Newer operators provide competition.
News at 11.
This is a fucking joke Telstra. The whole reason for the NBN is to get rid of copper, not run it along side it. Get your services working with the ONT, we know you can do it since you run the same hardware on the Velocity/Smart communities networks and customers ONT.
If this is not done, people will go to other providers who can and are already doing it and your poor shareholders will ask why this decision was made when there is less profit made.
Muppets.
For this to be a successful bit of infrastructure the government needs the NBN to reach a point where they are self sustaining in a reasonable amount of time. This means that the large ISPs had to sign contracts to move people away from ADSL. To combat this, the ISPs seem to be pushing their customers to move to cable, they are trying to keep customers on their old telephony infrastructure, and are holding out on negotiating some things with the NBN Co.
In essence, they are using their market power to push back on the NBN, to try get the most favourable contracts possible, while locking their customers into old infrastructure technology, which means the NBN may take a lot longer to become a viable project.
"...you'd still need to keep the copper running for non-subscribers"
There aren't supposed to be any non-subscribers, as all telephone, internet, and eventually television, is supposed to run over fiber.
"Seems like a reasonable trade-off if they are taking the savings and using the capital to accelerate the roll-out of fibre internet."
They aren't. They are doing this, if anything, to hamper the roll-out of the fiber. It's also good to remember, that this company (Telstra) was essentially given this infrastructure by the government, as it was previously Australia's telecom monopoly. Now they use that infrastructure as a weapon. The NBN Co (the people rolling out the fiber) are a completely separate entity.
"Even if you put a fibre-based POTS system in every exchange..."
You don't need this, as VoIP has been around for a fair while now, and many ISP's bundle their internet with VoIP. Most modern routers have ports for it, so it's not a problem. They aren't self powered, but most people have mobile phones which work fine most of the time, and many people have wireless home phones which also don't work when the power goes out. I'm sure that if this was a real problem, more solutions for self-powered would come up.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Basically in the first areas where the NBN has been deployed the biggest complaint from the customers was about the need to have battery packs inside their homes and the fact they will need to be replaced periodically.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/276366,nbn-users-complain-about-battery-backup.aspx
Although some people or businesses may need to have working POTS during a black out I'm not convinced that it is appropriate to have it in all premises, particularly in a country like Australia where everyone has a mobile phone anyway.
However it is currently a requirement for the NBN installation that the phones work during powercuts. Stopping the mass installation of batteries and instead requiring people to keep their copper lines until either a better plan or smarter requirements can be implemented seems quite sensible to me.
TFA may have a point about prices - but no one is forced to choose Telstra. I'll be sticking with iinet and getting twice the data allocation and about six times the speed that I'm currently getting on ADSL.
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
It's Telstra, what do you expect. This is the company that has kept regional centres on dialup and whilst giving a RIM-job to major urban centres.
They have repeatedly been busted for telling other telco's "there are no ports available at X exchange" but then selling Telstra ADSL services from the same supposedly full exchange.
Do you honestly expect Telstra not to try and screw up the NBN.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
(Quote from W's "Secrets of Consulting")
If you have a Plan A (fiber),
. Have a Plan B (copper).
But - really, Telstra - make the bloody copper link FREE.
IMO, the -reason- Telstra's share price has hovered around Au$ 3.00 for years... is because people too often choose Telstra by "force" not because they love Telstra... Telsta is - once again - playing the monopolistic "heavy" even in 2012.
---
Testra is NOT "too big" to fail. May it fail -sooner- rather than later,
thereby making way for smaller., more flexible / creative mini-telcos
replace it.
The technology to run telephony over fibre is extremely expensive. It's much cheaper to just run Ethernet for the Internet and leave telephony on ISDN.
Yes, one could do VoIP, but that's just *juck*. Not only will you have huge delays, modems won't work (still essentialy for many businesses), but it still requires seperate networks with complex configurations so it'll still work when you use the Internet.
(Don't get me wrong, there are situations where VoIP has its uses, but it's certainly no alternative to plain old ISDN)
the big deal about this, and the reason for such irony, is that Telstra, as part of the NBN deal, was excempted from an old law that forced it to provide a copper line for every house. Now i'm unsure of the exact specifics of the law but the practical result is that every new house built for the past 30 odd years required a line and it was at telstra's expense in most cases (approx $2000 each).
What is really happening here is that telstra has a national copper network thats now become irrelevant. Much like how most ISP's required you to have an "active" line rented before allowing you to get DSL on top, Telstra will force clients to have a copper line to qualify for fiber. And further more in a few years, just like with the invention of "Naked DSL" (DSL without a rented line), Telstra (and others who follow telstra down this path) will invent something along the lines of "Naked Fiber".
On a side note, there was, and still is, a decent chance that telstra will dig up part of its copper network and onsell the copper metal raw material. Copper has roughly trippled in price over the past few years so the economics are being reviewed.
The opposition leader wants to tear out the NBN, and reinvest the money in more roads for Western Sydney.
"Copper telephone" means a telephone made out of copper. "Copper telephone lines" is what the headline of course meant. I came here thinking the story would actually be interesting--why in the world would a company want customers to use copper telephones? Why a company might want customers to use copper telephone lines is pretty obvious: you can charge more for two services than for one. Nothing interesting to see here (though I hope for Australian's sake the situation changes); move along.
Poor Old Telstra - It just doesn't get it.
We are talking 19th Century technology here - and Telstra prefers this over fibre for phone calls? Please - get in the game.
How is running Telstra? Who thought this was a good idea?
Progress is happening rapidly in Australia, with the country's government continuing to roll out a nation-wide fibre network
No it's not. It's happening at a snail's pace you doofus.
... why should they allow phone calls to congest the bandwidth for all those torrents and downloads?
if the copper wires are still there and function without any problem, why remove them? classic saying "don't touch what aint broke"
The copper's in place and it's voice-grade communication we're talking about here. Oh and why is anything a population half the size of California does even /.-worthy?
The answer is more likely quite simple, Telstra are profit whores. Imagine being able to sell your customers expensive FTTH yet still charge them $30/month rental fee for a copper landline that they may or may not be using. The fact is that Naked DSL has been cutting into their landline profits. On top of that when the ACCC forced them to open up the copper lines to competition that has further eroded their cost structure when you can now get fully unlimited internet and telephone line rental for $60 from a competitor rather than paying $50 to the competitor and still $30 to Telstra for line rental.
Interesting the number of people who point our the power issues being the critical deciding factor here, as if Telstra somehow mandates that an entire country should have phones working during a blackout. These days that doesn't even work anymore. Setting aside the people who have Naked DSL and use VoIP for their home phone, or the people who don't have a home phone at all simply instead using their mobiles, there are a really large portion of people who have a landline with a cordless phone attached to it. Guess what happens to the cordless basestation during the blackout?
If you want to ensure quality of service give people the option. I'd be happier if they dedicated their efforts to ensuring the backup powersupply at the local mobile tower was up to the task rather than offering me a fibre phone with a battery backup. But then again if someone actually desperately NEEDs the ability for a landline to ride through a power outage, why not simply fork out the $100 every 5 years or so for a decent battery?
For fuck's sake, get your language fucking right.
The ACA probably still has requirements for a fixed copper line to be present at every household to ensure people can dial 000(emergency) - especially since fibre has not been tested enough in various situations like floods, fires, storms etc. This makes perfect sense to me.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076257/quotes?qt=qt0417045
I'd like to say screw them, get fiber + cell phone and tell their landline to suck it but from the article you can't, you get a copper line no matter what. Personally I think cell phones are underrated. Cell phone towers have huge battery backups and beyond that usually generators like COs, if they go down in a storm they have portable towers too. My cell phone probably has a good charge already. I can pilfer some off my laptop, there's emergency chargers and if need be I can plug that into an UPS or generator for power. Plus I can charge it where there is power and bring it where there is not. And all towers from all providers in range will route our version of 911 calls unless they're all down.
Here in Norway about a third of all landlines have disappeared the last decade and the trend is still strong downwards. People simply aren't interested in maintaining and paying for a copper based network simply to be a backup. Give me fiber, give me cell phones, put the rest into giving the power grid redundancy because it sucks when nothing but the phone works. Deploy a satellite phone and generator in each population center for when both power and phones go down to use in real emergencies, it's the only thing that's really guaranteed to work if the local infrastructure is toast. In such cases a lot of the time the answer will be that they can't reach you so you're on your own anyway.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If you believe the stats which are constantly flung at us, maybe 90% of adults have a mobile phone. Certainly, if I were concerned about the reliability of a fibre link to the premises for phone calls I would be using mobile as a backup, not copper.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
POTS is a carefully engineered system (as is the entire telephone system, for that matter). It's a distributed system, designed to increase reliability by keeping the parts that are most likely to need repair concentrated at a single location: the central office. The parts of the system least likely to need repair are located at the periphery of the system: the terminal equipment. Remember the jokes about being able to drive nails with the old Western Electric handsets? If you take apart a WE phone, all you'll find is transformers, capacitors and switch contacts, all of which look incredibly rugged for the job they have to do. That's because it cost Ma Bell money if any of that stuff failed. They'd have to send a truck and a tech out to replace it. So it's designed to be entirely passive, rugged and the path between the central office and the subscriber set is automatically tested for continuity every night.
So why should you still keep your POTS line in this day of fiber? Well, for a start, as someone has pointed out below, it will keep working when the power goes out. Not just for 2 hours or until the battery on the wimpy UPS supplied by your fiber company runs out, but as long as the central office works, your phone will work (if you've been smart enough to keep one "genuine Bell" phone, that is). Use your cellphone? Sure, go ahead and try. Just know that everyone else is trying to do the same thing, and there's only a limited number of channels available on the cell site. So you may not get service and you may end up getting dropped if you do. Not usually a problem, you say. I agree, unless you're trying to dial 911.
Sure, POTS is a dinosaur, and it's probably not going to be around much longer. But it's way more reliable than fiber, and I think I'll hold on to mine. Besides...I kinda like the feel of those old Wester Electric handsets.
The line tech that repaired my dsl last month told me Verizon will soon be requiring new dsl customers to also have their land line phone service. Fortunately I'm grandfathered, otherwise it would be a definite deal killer as far as I'm concerned.
How does that work? Do you have a daily quota and a fine if you don't meet it?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I have fiber to the home from Verizon, but in my neck of the woods, AC power goes out fairly frequently. Verizon provides my land line as VOIP and I have to maintain a battery backup to provide phone service during power outages. The battery will last for a max of about 8 hours. I'd much rather have a separate voltage coming into the house for unlimited phone service when there's no power. I'm glad I'm not in an iron lung.
Might be a power backup issue.
For instance Roadrunner, a cable companyâ(TM)s broadband here in the States, has power backup at the head end, battery backup of the customer equipment, but no power backup for the distribution infra-structure. This has led to large service disruptions in the past which could/would be catastrophic in an emergency event.
So when Verizon disables copper service when installing FiOS, we call them anti-competitive. But when Telstra leaves the copper service there when installing their FTTH service, they're either luddites or scamming customers?
The telco has to either leave the copper there, which comes with the cost of maintaining the POTS network, or remove it and get charged with forcing customers into a one-way upgrade to a (presumably more expensive) fiber-only service.
Verizon didn't even offer me the option to retain my copper wiring once FIOS came to the neighborhood. If I'm not mistaken, it actually was a clause for signing up for service that my POTS line would be decommissioned and removed. They didn't just cut the wire, they dug it back up from my yard all the way to the box. I live in hurricane alley and never gave much thought about backup power for the phones. Then again we don't really have to worry about freezing to death in Florida.
Telstra have been doing the exact same thing in New Zealand for years. I have a cable connection for the Net and TV but still have to pay an arm and a leg for a copper telephone line (required to get the good Interwebs from Telstra). As usual, Big Business screws us (as it does everywhere) and our Government gets Big Business to draft the telecom laws and tells us what is good for us. Balance needs to be restored in the Force.
Its a copper telephone line. It reduces bandwidth required by the internet, and the infrastructure is still there.
...8 Track players *still* not allowed to have rewind buttons.
A few years ago I was listening to a radio show that mentioned Australia's impending problem with their POTS because no one was making the switching electronics anymore, and supplies were going to run out. They were talking about forcing urban centers to switch over to newer tech so they could cannibalize the urban copper network to keep the rural copper network running.
Have things changed that much, or have I just misremembered?
People don't call Australians "antipodes" for nothing. They get everything upside-down or backwards (or both).
This story is not so much of a big deal. Telstra will continue to use the copper for voice calls after NBN fibre is installed, but only for about 18 months. The copper is going to be ripped out, and then they'll have to use NBN fibre for voice, but they have to pay a wholesale rate to NBN for that voice traffic. While the copper is still around, which they own and have fully depreciated, they can supply a voice service at almost no marginal cost.
It's making hay while the sun shines.
The poster needs to go to the NBN website and read the tech docs.
The telephone service will be provided over the NBN using a dedicated channel and the UNI-V interface. This interface provides the standard copper connection that a POTS phone expects. Some providers may enable the voice circuit to be routed to a UNI-D data interface for an Asterisk PBX or the equivalent.
Using copper lines as the phone connection makes no sense as the NBN is replacing the copper network, and in greenfield areas like rebuilt Grantham will be the only network.
Telstra services the mainstream market. Most of whom want traditional telephone services.
Most of the market for wired telephony have grown up with POTS and are comfortable with the technology. It is an always on service, the quality of service is consistent (at least when dialling locally), the user interface is easy to understand (lift handset to use) and it doesn't require a power supply to operate. Apart from the difficulties with using VoIP with emergency call (000 in Australia) geolocation, it requires a number of external services and user maintained devices to be operational.
If you understand that most of the customers that are more progressive in their attitude towards telephone simply don't have a POTS at all (and use their mobile phone), and that specific hardware is not required to utilize VoIP (skype is pretty popular) it does make more sense.
I like to bash telstra as much as anyone else, and iiNet is a good company, but this is misguided.
I live in Australia and currently have cable internet and use VOIP for my home phone. I am planning to move to the NBN and continue to use VOIP for my home phone. Telstra might want to leave the copper in the ground but I won't be using it.
...at the Demise of Kodak article. Now replace Kodak with Telstra.
how would people jack in and out without a copper head hardline, eh?