John Linton
........Federal profligacy and Telstra's survival make for some interesting times.....potentially far better for Exetel than for any end user or for any other ISP.
We have had some preliminary contacts with both Telstra and NBN(Tas)Co over the past few weeks and will probably sign contracts with both those organisations over the coming days to participate in their limited upcoming fibre trials at Point Cook in Victoria (Telstra) and the three small towns in Tasmania (NBNCo). Because of the various 'non disclosure agreements' I cant make reference to the sort of information that an end customer would really want to know but that will become clear before the end of May. Some months ago we also signed contracts with Opticomm who provide access to the residential developments they have 'pre-fibred' in several States but we have not released prices for those services either as we wanted to wait and see if we could provide a single price for fibre services if the pricing 'strategies' of these three different organisations allowed us to do that.
Our current view, bearing in mind that we have yet to test any of the three organisations B2B ordering and provisioning systems, is that offering fibre services will not pose any delivery or support problems that weren't encountered in the early days of ADSL and, of course, there is no way we can determine how MTTR will compare. Pricing - I can't really make any comments except to say that, from what we have seen to date, we would believe we can offer equivalent pricing to our current ADSL2 services with the advantages of much higher speeds for those users who have a need for them. We have yet to have any meaningful discussions with Optus who also seem to be expanding their HFC and other fibre networks but such discussions (as with Telstra) would depend on a change in Optus policy that currently doesn't allow for wholesaling of those services.
It's a somewhat 'weird' situation. If there was a true commercial choice (which there very definitely isn't today) my current views are that I would prefer to deal with Telstra on providing fibre solutions simply because we know their B2B and resolution systems (and know they work) and know that their networks are highly reliable. They are also much more advanced in providing fibre solutions and have had fibre 'in the ground' for over three to ten years (depending on how you count) in the major capital cities (and from recent public statements also in Tasmania). Pricing, as always, will be a major issue but, for the first time, Telstra may find itself competing with a government who is becoming well known for its 'open cheque book' approach to funding and its 'we'll leave dealing with paying the money back to some future coalition government'. While this is not good for Australia's future tax payers it may provide for some very real competition.....at least until the borrowings run out.
None of these new 'networks' have any bearing on the overall broadband customer today or even in July when the first 'wholesale' NBNCo and Telstra fibre services may be actually installed. It will certainly be good news for the few thousand customers who will be the early recipients of these services but it will have no real impact. However, assuming these early installations are successful (and there's no reason to believe that won't be the case) at least Opticomm and NBNCo will continue to make fibre to the home services available to more and more locations around Australia.
Personally, it seems that while this may be media hyped as a great breakthrough it is far more important to a company like Exetel than it is, at least at this stage, to any end customer or to any other ISP.I'm sure you can work out why that would be but, briefly:
1) All of our competitors have based their current services on copper DSLAM roll outs of varying magnitudes
2) We never saw services based on the PSTN as having any long term future
3) We believed that wireless would be a superior/more cost effective solution for 'low download' users
4) We believed fibre in the major conurbations would replace the PSTN based networks
5) We thought that one or two major fibre network deployers (we assumed Telstra and Optus at the time) would base their services on part retail/part wholesale
6) We figured that smaller ISPs who had chosen their own PSTN deployment would be 'caught in a no-man's land in the initial stages of any real fibre roll out.
.....and several other reasons that are pretty obvious.
It will be interesting to see just what transpires over the coming twelve months but whatever happens it seems more than a possibility that the residential 'communications landscape' will look quite different to the way it looks today.
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