Telstra has announced that its cable network will be upgraded to provide speeds of 30Mbps in the coming months.
Speaking yesterday at the company's annual results day, Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo revealed that the company is planning an upgrade of its hybrid fibre coaxial cable network which will see broadband customers able to reach a theoretical maximum download speed of 30Mbps.
The upgrade will give 1.7 million households access to the improved speeds before the end of the year, the Telstra boss said. The telco's cable network covers around 2.7 million homes.
While the proposed cable speeds will outstrip those currently available for ADSL2+ broadband, which currently top out at around 20Mbps, Telstra plans to beat the 30Mbps limit with its Next G mobile network before the end of the decade.
"We have said that by 2009 we will take our speeds up to 40Mbps, and the handsets, the data cards and other things will continue to migrate as we plan, with all the suppliers that we deal with, on that migration path," Trujillo said.
While Telstra's 3G mobile network is currently capable of a 14.4Mbps downlink, according to the company, mobiles and data cards are not yet able to keep up in speed terms. Trujillo, however, said data cards offering 7.2Mbps are expected soon.
Mobile data cards have proved a boon to the company in boosting non-SMS data revenue. Telstra now has more than 300,000 wireless card users generating monthly ARPUs (average revenue per user) in excess of AU$100, with a run rate of 20,000 to 30,000 new subscriptions per month.
This is all very well. It is not necessarily the download speed that is important now, it is the upload speed. As a current cable user, the download speed of 17000 is fine, but the upload of 256 is appalling. There is a mountain of bandwidth available now that Foxtel is totally digital. Fix this upload speed logjam, and a lot of people will maybe sing the praises of Telstra.