John Linton We connected the first Tasmanian customers direct to the Exetel Hobart PoP yesterday and have begun the 'migration' of the 'old' Tasmanian customers to the new PoP which we would hope to complete by the end of the month. Currently Exetel use Optus (in their capacity as a Telstra Wholesale customer) to provide us with the ability to provide ADSL1 services in Tasmania and we have been unable to add any new customers in Tasmania for some eighteen months - during which time we have slowly lost some of the customers we had connected either because they moved and we could no longer provide a service or because they preferred to use ADSL2 from another provider. So everything has been on hold for us (and our customers in Tasmania) for far too long. It's good to be able to offer services in Tasmania again but it remains a pity that we can't provide an ADSL2 option or even a sensible HSPA option at this time.
Providing services in Tasmania is still much more expensive than providing them in any other part of Australia (including the Northern Territory) and if we were making a cold blooded commercial decision then we wouldn't have incurred the expense of the PoP which requires an expensive back haul simply to get it to Melbourne and from there to the 'outside world'. Even with the lower trans-Bass Strait costs provided by BassLink we can never make any money out of providing ADSL1 to Tasmanian customers and we never planned to - and, for the nit pickers, we also aren't 'complaining' about that fact. Our original reason was that we wanted to provide business data and VoIP services in Tasmania via Aurora Energy's fibre network around Hobart and Launceston and believed that over time, and if we were successful a combination of residential and business services would eventually break even. Hopefully Optus will also make more effort with HSPA in the future which is something that will become important to us in the not too distant future.
Of course we now have an even greater incentive to have a 'local presence' in Tasmania given the grandstanding that the Labor government is doing with their pork barreling of the Tasmanian federal electorates with the "NBN2 will be available by Christmas" nonsense they went on about which is now "NBN2 in Tasmania by an unspecified time in 2010". It really doesn't matter when the "NBN2 in Tasmania" comes about but, at least based on current political 'corner painting into' statements there appears to be a necessity for getting something running prior to the next election at the latest.....and that means, or at least I would have thought it would mean, that the commercial terms for wholesalers to gain access to the "NBN2" would have to be in place long before any 'turn on' date.....so those figures should be known around March 2010.
Of course, it may come to pass that tiny companies like Exetel are prohibited from gaining access to the "NBN2" on some commercial basis or political pretext or other - maybe 'legally scammed' by some sort of "during the pilot stages only a limited number of companies will be permitted access" type of stuff....but I think that could be quite difficult to make fly given the basis on which "NBN2" has been touted to date. Nil Desperandum - we are proceeding as if general access to whatever is turned on in Tasmania will be available to any sensible wholesaler with the credentials to meet any reasonable criteria:
(carrier license, financially sound, long term history of supplying data services, unique value adds, lowest pricing, already operating in Tasmania).
Failing that 'direct contract' we will certainly work with our current wholesale providers to buy 'indirectly' - though that would be undesirable for any length of time. Either way we would expect to be able to determine what we would be able to offer in terms of a high speed residential data service in Tasmania by "nn/nn/nn") depending on the desperation of the Labor party not to go to two successive elections promising to deliver an "NBN" (of whatever number) and having failed to do that.
So, sometime in the near future (prior to March 31st 2010?) Krudd is going to have to put up or shut up about what price high speed broadband can be delivered to an end user residential customer - and that is going to be a pretty seminal moment in Australian communications. One of the major repercussions (admittedly in microcosm) will quickly be seen. That will be what changes, if any of course, will be seen in the 'brave statments' being made by more than one small ISP about the future of their investment in ADSL2 DLSAMs in Tasmania. In other words will the actual reality of Krudd's "high speed broadband" service be priced at a level that would make a user decision on whether to buy a lower cost (assuming this is going to be the case) ADSL2 service that requires the user also renting a copper telephone line or will the new "NBN2" be priced low enough so there would be no case to continue to buy ADSL?
Perhaps that decision won't be clear cut and you can already hear the Labor spin spivs polishing their selection of cop outs:
"..of course it's very early days....",
"....you can't take a prototype test bed and read anything in to initial knee jerk reactions....",
"....take up was always going to be dependent on the applications that are not yet ready...."
etc, etc, etc.
Ignoring Krudd's nonsensical claims and whatever his spin spivs come up with to attempt to explain away anything negative for the Labor party you, me, any other person with an IQ closer to Central than Waterfall will be able to determine within days as to whether the Krudd "NBN2" is going to be the unbelievably expensive white elephant it has always looked like being or in fact whether it has some chance of, eventually, succeeding. We will see the statements of the ISPs who have ADSL2 DSLAMs in Tasmania telling their shareholders and the media whether they are going to continue investing in their own little Tasmanian networks or not.
Krudd needs to turn on, or be able to say it's very close to being turned on, the Tasmanian "test bed" (let's all get used to the downplaying of the importance of this exercise now and beat the rush next year) before the next Federal election but if he does try and do that he faces a major problem - one side of politics or the other is going to have a doozy of a scenario to go to that election with - and there's almost no chance it will be Krudd.
.....to be continued