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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.
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
Umm.. Because a file download 10 times faster than ADSL? I'm a pretty average user, and don't need anything close to 200GB.
But a 1GB video would download in about a minute at 100Mbps, vs about 10 minutes with ADSL. Then there's the latency of fibre vs copper (not to mention wireless).
The Average Usage even on a lot of large cap plans for those with decent connections in Australia is around 30GB, 10mb connections to 100Mbps is not going to suddenly make 10 times more content available. Sure there are those fringe users that try to download the entire internets porn collection every month, but they really are the minority (even if I do happen to be one of them).
Overage charges? (I don't know that they have those though).
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.
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.
Is that 1GB video file less than 10 minutes long?
If it is, then it must be pretty high quality... If not, then you can just start watching it before the download is complete so the download speed becomes irrelevant once its faster than the playback speed.
A 200GB cap equates to around 600kbit/month, so what your actually getting is a 600kbit connection which is burstable to 100mbit.
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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)
Fine - CD or DVD images, then.
..."
Just because I'm not downloading at 10MB/s 24/7 does not mean that I am unable to appreciate it finishing more quickly when I am downloading.
Oh, and did you read what you just wrote?
"download speed becomes irrelevant once its faster than the playback speed." -> "... a 600kbit connection
What if I want to watch a video with a higher bitrate than 600k? Is that unreasonable, just because I won't be streaming video constantly all month?
Sheesh.
"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.
There are 1TB plans out in the marketplace, why would you assume that the cap would remain constant?
No doubt someone will come out with a 100Mbps 'unlimited' plan.. of course, the contention ratio would be a very big number.
Don't forget that Telstra's internet branch - Bigpond, doesn't count downloads off their own servers. It's free. So if they retain that policy, you can stream stuff for nothing and doesn't add to the plan. Uploads are NOT free and are counted towards the plan.
Bigpond competitors have much bigger cap plans as a response, so you're more likely to get a 1T plan to cater for video streaming which will become the defacto standard when the NBN is finished.
It is crazy though as here we have Satellite for video, copper for phone and ADSL and Towers for mobiles (Cell phones) - soon Fibre. So an average household would have all or a combination of these.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
... 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"
If you're really that lacking in imagination, what the hell do you need 200GB/mo for? If the most bandwidth intensive thing you do is download streaming media, and you prefer your porn^W video at 1.5Mbps, you really watch more than 8 hours of video a day?
Some transfer protocols don't support reliable streaming. Streaming just doesn't make sense for the most bandwidth intensive tasks.
A modern game typically takes me more than 2 hours to download (with my ~2km ADSL connection). That'd be ready to go in 15 minutes at 100Mbps.
Now you're getting it! The original question was: "what is the point of a speed that fast with a download cap that small?". The answer is kind of obvious, right? "[The] connection [...] is burstable to 100mbit."
Not sure of the relevance of 600kbps is though - I don't know too many people that aim to spread their quota evenly throughout the month. Most downloads are bursted.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
crank up the bit rate a watch how fast you use up your cap in just a few movies (think a blue-ray, watch 4 a month and check your e-mail and you are done.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
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.
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.
It'll be the fastest 33 minutes and 20 seconds you've ever spent online!
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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.
The Average Usage even on a lot of large cap plans for those with decent connections in Australia is around 30GB, 10mb connections to 100Mbps is not going to suddenly make 10 times more content available. Sure there are those fringe users that try to download the entire internets porn collection every month, but they really are the minority (even if I do happen to be one of them).
At the moment. But the entire point (which seems to be deliberately ignored by every raving Liberal partisan out there (not that I'm saying you're a raving Liberal partisan of course)) is that the 'good ol' copper network is being pushed to it's limits by ADSL, and if the internet is going to grow more, it needs more bandwidth to do that in.
We may not use our 100Gb plans now, but that's probably because content companies are being constrained by the average bandwidth available, rather than being able to use whatever bandwidth they like in order to get their content across in the most effective way.
Ten years ago you would have wondered what the hell you needed 4Gb of memory in your PC for. Now you're thinking maybe that's not enough. In ten years time we'll be pondering whether 1Tb of memory is enough to keep your tablet from bottlenecking the 10Gb/s fibre connection.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
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).
My reference to the commit rate, is that the connection should be advertised as such, its not a 100mbit connection its only burstable to 100mbit. A 100mbit connection is one that can do 100mbits/sec all the time.
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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.
...at the Demise of Kodak article. Now replace Kodak with Telstra.
Assuming you meant "who" instead of "how"... his name is David Thodey, and he's a lot less controversial than the previous CEO, Sol Trujillo.
... wait, what?
The problem with that viewpoint is that the majority of internet content is not hosted in Australia. Faster internet is definitely very much needed in Australia, but the view that as soon as we have 100meg connections available that all this content is suddenly going to materialise is ridiculous, Australia size wise is a pimple on the arse of humanity, ie insignificant. whether you have a 10meg, 20meg of one of the current 100meg non NBN solutions currently in Aus the actual experience is not much different. I still look forward to high speed fibre, but it is ridiculous to think that it is going to significantly change Australian internet content significantly.