John Linton
As anyone who has heard or read my opinions on Exetel investing money in its own DSLAMs would know - I have ridiculed the concept on both the foolishness of deploying 25 year old technology which is right at the end of its use by date and the likelihood of Telstra making any such investment worthless any time it chose to do so. Maybe events will prove me to have been totally wrong on those assessments - but for the right reasons!
Some two years ago I had a cursory exchange of 'interest' with four DSLAM providers who had the ability to install equipment in Telstra's exchanges. All of the costings were pretty much the same from the three well known manufacturers (and really only differentiated in the attractiveness of their "financing" options) while the now better known Hua Wei was quite exceptionally economically attractive. However it appeared to me that the minimum costs were unlikely to be less than $10 million with an unknown amount of take up/ongoing interest and although a case could be made for an ADSL2 deployment it was very high risk (in my view) and I didn't ever seriously bring the case for an Exetel owned ADSL2 network to the attention of the other Exetel decision makers.
As it turned out we were able to get ADSL2 services from Optus at only a little more than our own costs would have been (excluding the inconvenience of bundling the telephone line rental and call charges) and that was 'risk free' so I told myself I had made a sensible and responsible decision.
Two years later the scenario has radically changed - partly because the cost of buying the SSS from Telstra has dramatically reduced and partly because - well I'm not really sure what the other "partly because" really is. It manifests itself as phone calls from each of the major ADSL2 DSLAM manufacturers, or brokers saying they repesent those companies, offering vastly improved terms, far lower prices and very, very quick activations for ADSL2 DSLAM ports in an array of attractive (to Exetel) exchanges in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
The pricing and financing are very, very attractive - no question about that; but why, assuming the offers turn out to be contractually real, are they being made? More importantly, what do these manufacturers know that isn't obvious to me? Is Telstra about to do something dramatic - or is it just that the forecasts of the ISPs who contracted for their roll outs aren't being met and therefore the manufacturuers are exercising their rights under whatever contracts they have to offer the 'spare' capacity to other prospective customers?
All very confusing. However we will now have to spend time looking at if such a scenario is possible in some limited number of exchanges in the CBDs of the major cities and, possibly, in some larger regional towns and cities that don't have too many choices.