John Linton
I have been following the various discussions and news articles on the vicissitudes of providing cable access to and from Tasmania with increasing interest over the past few months as the time gets closer for Exetel to make a decision on how to provide ADSL and other services to Tasmanian users more directly than we are currently able to do.
I read this, latest, set of 'nothing' statements:
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/18169/127/
yesterday which didn't enlighten me in any way.
Currently Exetel provides ADSL1 services to Tasmanian customers via an arrangement with Optus that no-one finds particularly suitable and, as with our customers in VIC, QLD, WA, SA and the NT, the only sensible way forward has been to establish PoPs in each State and run our own (leased) back hauls from those States and Territories to the main international junction points in Sydney (Southern Cross, AJC etc).
This has proven to be expensive (at our low volumes) but affordable in the wider context of delivering services and essential in getting rid of some of the contention issues involved in using back hauls that we could not control. Later this month, all being well, we will activate the new WA, SA and NT PoPs which will then leave the ACT and Tasmania still being serviced out of the Sydney Data Centres and connected by Optus inter-State bandwidth.
We will be able to establish an ACT PoP at the same/similar costs as the other PoPs but we are struggling to find a cost/effective back haul solution for Tasmania. Currently there is no fibre connectivity except via Telstra which, on current indications, is not going to allow a suitable pricing scenario for Exetel to deliver sensibly priced services to Tasmanian users - at least not sensibly priced in the terms we understand 'sensibly priced' to mean.
If we ever got an HSDPA service offering then that might solve the problem but that isn't imminent - earliest date would be October 2008.
I find it a curious disparity that Darwin, and other population centres in the NT can be connected to Adelaide at far less cost than Tasmania can be connected to Melbourne. An obviously 'politically incorrect' Tasmanian postulated that it was because there were very few aboriginal people in Tasmania and therefore the Federal Government's bottomless bucket of funding wasn't available to Tasmanians.
We have been talking to two organisations in Tasmania (other than Telstra) about back haul from Hobart and Launceston but are not making much progress. I would feel very badly about not being able to provide Exetel's services in Tasmania in the same way we provide them everywhere else in Australia but, at least at the moment, finding a way or ways to do it is proving almost as difficult as finding a suitable HSPA service - and is beginning to look as though the time to find a solution is going to take as long.
So far we have been discussing these issues with Tasmanian companies via email and telephone which, for every other supply contract we have with all of our suppliers, has always been suitable. I'm now of the opinion that we will have to get some sort of understanding of just what the Tasmanian State government is prepared to do to make the BassLink project actually deliverable in terms of access to companies such as Exetel and that seems to require some ongoing 'face to face' discussion.
Perhaps its possible to provide some 'innovative thinking' to the Tasmanian government that goes beyond, and is truly creative, compared to what they may have been provided with to date? A long, long time ago I remember playing a not insignificant part in helping the Tasmanian government reduce their costs of obtaining computer and printer equipment to a level that they never dreamed was possible (at that time) which played a major part in providing Tasmanian school children and Tasmanian government offices with facilities that had never been previously affordable.
Maybe that will be possible to do again?
What is becoming almost certainly clear is that there has to be something done to unblock whatever is holding up the delivery of affordable connectivity between 'Australia' and Tasmania and therefore everything else that is being held up.