Optus has poured scorn on Telstra's plans to upgrade its HFC cable, saying that it will only benefit a very small number of Australians.
Upgrading HFC is not the answer to Australia's broadband future
Optus spokesperson
"Upgrading HFC is not the answer to Australia's broadband future as it will only ever benefit selected areas in major capital cities and not 98 per cent of the population," a spokesperson for the company said in a statement. "The fact is, only a very low percentage of customers at best will ever experience the claimed speeds of 100Mbps."
Telstra yesterday issued what appeared to be a veiled challenge to Optus to upgrade its own HFC cable footprint to 100Mbps.
"The great news is that there's an alternative infrastructure out there, and it's owned by our competitor. There are no restrictions on anybody doing the same thing that we're choosing to do," outgoing Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo said when announcing the upgrade plans. "This could be a nice wake-up call to some others to say 'we're going to do the same', much like what happened with wireless."
Optus said only that it had been trialling the technology to upgrade its HFC cable amongst other technologies for faster broadband, but there had been no firm decision as yet.
Optus is one of the bidders for the government's $4.7 billion National Broadband Network, which is slated to reach 98 per cent of the population. Fibre to the node technology is believed to form the basis of most bids to build the NBN.
Telstra had still not provided any "real" answer for rural and regional areas, according to Optus.
Yesterday at Telstra's briefing, when asked whether the company had plans to extend the HFC cable out to the millions of Australians who had fixed line connections, outgoing CEO Sol Trujillo said it was obvious the company wouldn't do all of them with HFC, although the company might extend the footprint a little, depending on demand. A technology mix was needed to provide the service customers wanted, he said, including Next G and the Telstra ADSL2+ network.
The speeds on HFC would vary, Optus said, since the network was shared, meaning that the more users on the HFC network the slower the speeds. Telstra's group managing director, networks and services, Michael Rocca put the average speeds on the network at 70-100Mbps.
Optus also believed the upgrade, which would require each home to be individually wired up to the HFC, would be an inconvenient process for most customers, and potentially also an expensive one if they wanted to achieve the higher speeds, since they would have to upgrade their modems.
Telstra has not yet decided on how or whether it will charge for customer premises equipment. There were many possibilities including the subsidisation method used by Vodafone for notebooks, according to Trujillo.
For the first time in a long time, I actually agree with Trujillo's comments here. His encouragement for competing companies to get off their backsides is precisely what this company needs.
It's just a shame that it's taken him this long to say it in such a simple way.