Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Graeme Samuel took Telstra to task this week for not switching on high-speed ADSL2+ broadband nationwide.

"Telstra argues that regulatory barriers are preventing it from rolling out ADSL2+ to more [telephone] exchanges," Samuel said in a landmark address to the annual conference of the Australian Telecommunications Users Group in Sydney.

"According to Telstra, without regulatory certainty, it cannot offer ADSL2+ in exchanges where its competitors do not already offer this service for fear that the ACCC would decide to regulate access to a wholesale ADSL2+ service."

Samuel added all Telstra had to do to get that regulatory certainty was to write to the ACCC asking for it. "You can't get much more certainty than that," he said.

The ACCC boss also stated that Telstra's rivals now had a "more developed" proposal for a national fibre broadband network than the giant telco ever had.

Eds note: In this video, Communications Minister Senator Helen Coonan defends the country's telecommunications regulatory regime.