Alcatel report confirms crappiness of Telecom's copper network
Not wishing to come over all I-told-you-so, but pre-unbundling, I warned not to expect miracles with the opening of Telecom's local exchanges. Forcing Telecom to raise the broadband speed limited from 3.5Mbit/s to 8Mbit/s has already created ferocious arguments about wholesale pricing and alleged lack of space inside exchanges for competitors' gear.
But it's the practical problem that's worse. Raising the DSL upper speed limit to 8Mbit/s is tantamount to the government trying to solve Auckland's motorway woes by raising the rush hour speed limit to 150km/hour. Doesn't quite gel with reality, baby.
Now a report from one of Telecom's main infrastructure providers, Alcatel, confirms that even with the current 3.5Mbit/s top-out, one quarter of DSL customers aren't getting the speed they pay for -- and that to get to 8Mbit/s under the promised 'unconstrained bitstream', or 24Mbit/s under the coming ADSL2, you'll have to live within 1km of your local phone exchange. Read Juha Saarinen's full report in our sister publication Computerworld here.
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Comments
Blaming Telecom's "Crappy" network shows remarkable ignorance of the ADSL2+ standard performance - speeds in the NZ network are more or less what you'd expect by reading the speed vs distance graph. Going to "unconstrained" ADSL1 for everyone will inevitably cause circuits at the fringes to fall over due to excessive crosstalk, which is one reason why speed restrictions were introduced to JetStream about 3 years ago when customer numbers started to be significant.
A fibre overlay would be great, but who funds it? TelstraClear gave up doing a fibre/copper hybrid when they couldn't make it pay. It would probably round out at $1000 or so per urban section, and ten times that for rural - perhaps $3B all up. Are we all going to volunteer to pay our share, whether to Telecom, Telstra, the government or someone else?
Posted by: steve | August 18, 2006 11:00 PM
Fibre Yes - and TelstraCLear already has heaps of that - just not going to individual homes and small businesses...
Hang it form the Power-Poles - you must be mad?!! Do you realise what that would look like, not to mention, in case you haven't noticed, 2/3 of our streets don't have power poles anymore. And look what happened in Sydney when the Ockers tried it!
Posted by: Mycenius | August 15, 2006 6:24 PM
Couldn't agree more. Fibre is the answer. I can't understand why it is supposedly so expensive. What does it cost to pull a cable thru existing ducts? Can't be that much. No duct, hang it from the power poles. Should be able to several streets in a day.
Posted by: John | August 2, 2006 1:24 PM
The government should have also forced Telstra to unbundle their cable network in Wellington and Christchurch, as that is where the future of broadband is, and people on Telstra are able to get far faster upload and download speeds than you can get with DSL.
This is exactly the same issue that is happening in Australia, where to get fast speeds with ADSL2 you have to live within a few kms of the exchange. It is just a deficiency with the copper line/DSL technology, and has nothing to do with telecoms service.
The government should either be investing in WIMAX throughout the country, or laying fibre optic cabling.
Posted by: Rob | August 1, 2006 2:55 PM
Fibre, and not the dietary variant, is what we need...
Posted by: Juha | July 31, 2006 2:52 PM