David Braue07 February 2008, 4:35 AM
It's well and good that Telstra has switched on ADSL2+ for 2.5 million homes, but thousands of people will discover they are still getting slow speeds despite paying premium rates for the new service. Here's why fibre is the only solution.
Telstra may finally be switching on its ADSL2+ services in over 900 exchanges around the country, but it had better be ready to handle the legions of disappointed customers who will find out that just because they’re paying for ADSL2+, doesn’t mean they’re getting it.
The surprise announcement, which ended more than a year in which Telstra had flat-out refused to turn on the ADSL2+ equipment it had installed, was hailed by responsible minister Stephen Conroy as a step forward for Australian broadband – and it is, as long as there’s less than about a kilometre of wire between you and your local Telstra exchange.
Note that I’m talking about wire, not distance; telecommunications cabling snakes its way under the streets and the actual length of the wire to your house can be nearly twice the physical distance.
This translates into ADSL2+ signal attenuation that means just one thing you need to care about: while Telstra will potentially be providing (and charging) more than 2 million homes for 20Mbps services, many of those will be limping along at a tenth of the speed.
My house, in a densely populated area 13km outside of Melbourne, is around 3km from the exchange but apparently has more than 4km of wiring (you can check your own situation, along with an estimate of the ADSL2+ speeds you can expect, at www.adsl2exchanges.com.au .
Throw in the usual spaghetti of in-house phone wiring, and I was welcomed to the world of ADSL2+ with speeds of just 1.5Mbps; moving to another phone outlet in the house, I was cruising along at a blistering 800Kbps – that’s 0.8Mbps.
After much swearing, reconfiguration, technical support calling, and dusty crawling around the roof, I found and disconnected an errant phone line that, it seems, was introducing interference into the connection.
I know this because speeds jumped – all the way to 2.9Mbps. If that doesn’t sound like ADSL2+ to you, well, you’re thinking like I am. And I’m thinking that while Telstra has done something good by turning on these DSLAMs, it’s only the beginning – and not the end, as was suggested by Internode head Simon Hackett in response to the announcement.
Widespread ADSL2+, Hackett reasoned, would obviate the need for a fibre-to-the-node network as it becomes more widespread. But given my own experiences, I think ADSL2+ is just going to be a toe in the water; my own service would become far faster if there were a fibre-equipped node on a nearby street corner – which would mean my signal wouldn’t have time to attenuate over a few hundred metres to the local node.
In the meantime, new ADSL2+ customers expecting an instant speed boost need to temper their expectations; there are still so many variables affecting performance that it’s just not a guarantee of anything. Until the FttN rollout gets underway, millions of customers, me included, just won’t be getting what they paid for.