Telstra has lashed out at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's additional monitoring of its ADSL rollout.
Furthermore, the telco says it's "fed up" being the target of the industry watchdog's "wrong and misleading" media-aimed remarks.
Telstra's latest rebuke follows the ACCC's move to monitor the telco's deployment and fault handling of Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line technology, which improves the existing copper loop to deliver high-speed Internet access.
This is on top of weekly reports Telstra has to provide to the ACCC about how competitors can get access to its Exchange buildings to hook up their equipment to its copper wire network
"Telstra feels [additional monitoring] basically isn't necessary and that this kind of information can easily be checked should there be a complaint," a Telstra spokesperson told ZDNet.
Telstra claims additional regulation places a further burden on it in terms of manpower and costs, "it's completely unnecessary and completely uncommercial," the spokesperson added.
However, the ACCC said it wants to ensure all carriers are "playing on a level playing field" and that any fault-finding is of a non-discriminatory basis.
"There is always the possibility that [Telstra] might give its own products the inside running," the ACCC said in a statement.
"It isn't clear why the ACCC would [say] things when there's no evidence of it happening," the Telstra spokesperson said.
"There's nothing to suggest Telstra has done anything wrong, yet we find ourselves targeted as if we have. Any implication that Telstra has done anything wrong in this is completely and utterly wrong and misleading," the spokesperson added.
However, the ACCC believes it's being "entirely reasonable," ACCC GM of telecommunications, Michael Cosgrave, said.
"The ACCC's concern would be if Telstra were to deploy its own retail products at a different time frame than products competition uses," Cosgrave added. "Putting [additional] regulation in place allows us to judge very quickly if discrimination is happening or not."
Despite the on-going public feud, the telco remains confident that the reputation and rollout of its new technologies will remain untarnished.
"We're broadbanding Australia and have already launched ADSL," CEO Ziggy Switkowski said at last week's annual general meeting.
Switkowski predicted that within two years 90 percent of Australians will have ADSL Internet access and that Telstra will connect one million broadband customers over the next five years.
With 50 competitors in the Australian telcommunications arena and an industry that is set to grow at about 10 percent per annum, well ahead of GDP growth, "Telstra will capture a significant amount of this growth," Switkowski said.
