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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.
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
The telco (unless it is third world) will have massive diesel generators (and a stock pile of diesel) to keep things operational in an emergency. As long as there is electricity or diesel the phones should continue to work.
That's true. Although, in reality I think 9/10 households will be using a cordless phone which will be useless in a power outage, regardless to how you're hooked into the phone network. Speaking of which, can you even buy non-cordless phones these days?
I suggest you don't live here. There are many parts of Australia where Telstra is the only supplier. their mandate, aparrt from making money, is to provide communications to all of Austrlaia. Most of the other companies suck in rural and outback areas. It there was an alternative, that would be called competition.
Nos Morituri te salutamus
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.
Don't kid yourself. Telstra are doing it for one reason: Money. They have an existing copper network, if it fails to generate revenue it turns into a worthless multi-billion dollar liability that they will still have to maintain year after year.
Their New Zealand subsidiary, TelstraClear, kicked up a huge fuss about over-building their docsis cable network with a government subsidised national fibre network build. They threw their toys out their cot and threatened to shut up shop and leave the country.
Last time I was on their cable network you couldn't buy internet services without a $50/month phone line.
Should someone really have to buy a very expensive satellite phone + plan, or move somewhere else, because their telephone company wants to replace their (perfectly fine) POTS connection with something that stops working a little while after the power goes out?
http://pinopsida.com
Sounds simple enough to me: They have low moral standards and are trying to maximize profits. Welcome to the real world.
(This applies to the summary too...)
No sig today...