Optus hits market with ADSL denial - News - Communications

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Optus hits market with ADSL denial

By Rachel Lebihan, ZDNet Australia News
January 15, 2002
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Optus-hits-market-with-ADSL-denial/0,130061791,120262949,00.htm

Optus has denied rampant rumours within the broadband community that it's firing up an ADSL service that will rival Telstra's oft-criticised broadband solution.

The country's second largest telco has ruled out the possibility of releasing its own ADSL mix to the market -this financial year and beyond", despite reports on broadband community Web site Whirlpool saying the carrier is gearing up to launch a service that will run 12 times faster than Telstra's 512Kbit plan.

-Offering a service like Optus ADSL is simply not in the current business plan," an Optus spokesperson told ZDNet Australia today.

Optus did concede that it conducted a -proof of concept" trial for DSL last year, but said it didn't want to disappoint customers and start to generate demand for a service that wasn't in the pipeline in the near future.

According to Whirlpool, one of the issues holding up the alleged Optus ADSL service is ascertaining whether customers have high enough quality lines to run a 6Mbit ADSL service -- that's 12 times faster than Telstra's own.

However, Optus refused to disclose the results of the trial. -They're commercially confident at this stage," the spokesperson said. -We're concentrating on what we're currently doing and doing it well," she added.

Quoting sources, Australian IT reports today that Optus is planning to deliver pay television over copper phone lines in the 2002-03 financial year.