Telstra starts offering wholesale 3G

Telstra has begun offering 3G post-paid wholesale products to resellers, while holding off on offering the full Next G package to its rivals.

This will be the first phase that the product roll-out was first hinted in September by the telco.

Telstra told ZDNet Australia that the wholesale postpaid product is not Telstra's Next G and will be capped below the regular data transfer rates available on Next G.

The 3G wholesale product will cover 97 per cent of the population and have typical download speeds of between 300 kilobits per second (Kbps) and 1.1 megabits per second (Mbps). This speed is lower than the lowest typical download speed Telstra advises for its own Next G network, which puts its highest download speeds between 1.1Mbps and 20Mbps for the Ultimate Broadband dongle.

The decision to cap speeds for wholesale products will keep the company's network from running into further capacity issues, in a time when Telstra's Next G has come under strain as the company adds millions of new mobile customers.

The second phase, expected to be rolled out later this year, will offer prepaid mobile services and wireless broadband, Telstra said.

"This is a competitive and high quality product which delivers great coverage and speed to our wholesale customers. We believe it is a competitive 3G offering in the wholesale market," the telco giant said.

Telstra has begun negotiations with smaller telcos to resell the services, but it is not clear which operators may seek to pick up Telstra's wholesale. Vodafone and Optus currently wholesale services to companies such as Dodo, iiNet, Internode, Red Bull, Virgin and Woolworths, and The Australian reported earlier this week that both Optus and Vodafone were thinking about offering wholesale long-term evolution (LTE) services to these companies when their LTE networks are up and running.

Dodo founder Larry Kestelman has previously said that he would be open to wholesaling 3G services from Telstra, but told ZDNet Australia today that he had not seen any offers from Telstra, and was still under agreement with Optus.

Telstra has no plans at this stage to wholesale its 4G services and the company is rumoured to be launching its first 4G handset on 24 January. Reportedly, the first handset will be the HTC Velocity, and will be available on a $79 per month post-paid plan.