Dan Warne10 March 2009, 12:00 PM
Melbourne, you lucky bastards. You'll be surfing at 100Mbit/s by Christmas, according to Telstra.
Telstra has announced it will upgrade its HFC network to 100Mbit/s using DOCSIS 3.0 technology, after successful rollouts by other cable operators around the world.
In a conference call this morning, CEO Sol Trujillo would not name dates for other cities. "We want to make this as robust and successful as we can, and as we move forward, the board, the management will make decisions based on the customer demand, revenue and usage levels that we think we can stimulate."
The upgrade will cost Telstra $300 million, which does not include the cost of the DOCSIS 3.0 compliant modems customers will need to pay for to access the new high speeds.
The high speed cable service will pass 1 million homes in Melbourne. The network has a total footprint of 2.5 million homes around the country, which means that around 8 million homes are not reached by the network.
Why Melbourne first and not Sydney or Brisbane? "We have a pretty big footprint in Melbourne," said Sol Trujillo. "We have our engineering team, our technology team and some of the technology equipment already located in some of our labs that we've been testing for the last year. So it's a lot easier for us to get started and move quicker where we have the centricity of the platform, the component pieces and the people to make it happen. It's that simple."
Telstra said it has the technical capability to extend the speed to 200Mbit/s.
However, it admitted that the upstream speed was only 2Mbit/s. Trujillo said this speed would be fast enough to do high definition video conferencing. "We will be able to provide high resolution video conferencing on this platform — high resolution, not what you're used to in terms of standard definition video conferencing," he said.
However, he also said there was very little demand from customers for fast upstream speeds.
"We're not intending to be enabling broadcast of content which would require big amounts of speed here. What we're trying to do is tailor this to what our customers are telling us they'd like to do as services, and that's the vast majority of customers. There are specialised needs I would agree where higher upspeeds would be necessary, but in terms of our platforms that we have today, we're not having much demand from customers saying they need 20Mbit/s or 100Mbit/s upstream," he said.
"Right now, the customer feedback, the demand and research doesn't indicate the need for super high upstream speeds. What most people are doing in today's environment is mostly in the other direction in terms of downloads."
Telstra's head of networks, Michael Rocca, also said that 2Mbit/s was faster than the upstream speed proposed in the Rudd government's FTTN rollout, which would have topped out at around 1Mbit/s. However, he conceded 2Mbit/s was a max speed shared among all customers on a cable node.