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."

Comments

Typical

[SultanCemil]

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?

Re:Typical

[Andy Dodd]

So what? It's not like copper for phone calls has any disadvantages. Quality will be about the same unless wideband VoIP is deployed (almost no one has done that), and it's better for safety since the copper phone lines are powered by the CO, which usually has multiple redundant backup power supplies. If your home's power goes out - you can call 911 with copper but not with VoIP.

Re:Could make sense

[miaDWZ]

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?

Re:progress

[Ghaoth]

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.

Re:Could make sense

[viperidaenz]

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.

Re:Could make sense

[atomicthumbs]

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?