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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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.