Telstra's plans to switch on ADSL2+ across 900 exchanges throughout the country may have a substantial destabilising effect on the communications market, and alter the national carriers relationship with government and regulators, according to a report.
Elders this week announced it would make 80 per cent of its telecommunications staff redundant as it closed its internet service provider division.
Labor has said it is prepared to work with the government's existing WiMax plans if it wins the next election -- but the party's shadow Communications Minister is getting the knives out for the Coalition's expert taskforce on fibre-to-the-node.
The federal government's rural broadband plan is just a "spoiler", Labor frontbencher Simon Crean said today.
The government has revealed how its new plan will tackle broadband blackspots in both metropolitan and rural areas using WiMax.
Much has been made of Telstra's decision to finally stop holding Australia to ransom, and to actually turn on the ADSL2+ equipment it has installed in what is apparently over 900 of its exchanges around the country.
If there was ever evidence that the stoush over broadband had gotten personal, it came when Telstra's sour-grapes mentality led it to sue Helen Coonan, personally, for claimed procedural flaws in the OPEL contract.
Sprint's WiMAX roll-out in Baltimore will prove the Australian government's decision to worm its way out of the Opel WiMAX contract was a short-sighted, and ultimately damaging, political stunt that has benefited nobody.
With the OPEL bid cancelled and procedural questions dogging the FTTN bid, Australia is currently in something of a technological limbo.
With all the excitement over the iPhone, few people have noticed that 1 July was the 11th anniversary of the deregulation of Australia's telecommunications market.
When the government announced that Optus and Elders had won the bid to build Australia's bush broadband network, it provoked jeers and plaudits alike, but it was the ISPs' choice of WiMax as the bearer technology that has provoked the most furious storm of argument. Just how will the technology stand up to life in the bush?
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