Telstra has sought to lay down the law on the vexed issue of delivering broadband Internet services throughout Australia, describing any push to do so as "a waste of resources".

Telstra Countrywide regional managing director Roger Bamber told a rural and remote communications conference in Sydney today the carrier would focus instead on enabling those users without access to broadband to get as close as possible to a 64 Kb Internet connection.

"We didn't build the telephone network for the Internet, but re-engineering the infrastructure so it can carry broadband services would be a waste of resources," Bamber said, going on to defend the use of pair gain technology, which has recently come under fire.

"If the cable is full our job is to provide connectivity through the most cost-effective means and there are far more cost-effective ways to spend our budget than spending AU$2 billion and ten years ripping out the pair gain technology that is already in place."

According to Bamber, ADSL services are available to close to 80 percent of the Australian population, with ISDN services available to 94 percent. He went on to say that Satellite technology was available to those areas which weren't covered by ADSL.

"People who don't have access to ADSL, may well be able to gain access to an ISDN connection, and if not their alternative is to use asynchronous or synchronous satellite," he said.

Bamber claimed that, over the last four years, Telstra had managed to significantly reduce wait times on new connections to regional areas, in some cases by hundreds of days. He added that, while there were problems with the nationwide network, these were not as serious as might have been presented in the past. "The external network is not falling apart," Bamber said. "We have just spend AU$50 million putting gas in the cables in areas where it is required, and the gel that was reported to have failed only affected three percent of the network." Accepting criticism that the current network was not aimed at providing synchronous broadband services throughout Australia Bamber said Telstra had not yet solved the problem of how to provide reasonably priced, cost effective synchoronous Internet access, as there was not yet any technology capable of providing such service to a population as disperse as that of Australia. -The network was built to last for 95 years in the pre-Internet era, our job is on working out how to maximise it," Bamber said.

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