Broadband backwater

The advent of the internet 15 years ago changed the way people looked at global communications. Back then, a router forwarded data packets across a network towards their destinations. Routing occurred at layer three (the network layer) of the OSI even-layer protocol stack.

Today, however, with the ratification of new technology like ADSL, broadband uptake has increased to a point where in Australia, more than three million broadband services are now connected, according to an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) report released in March.

The number of those subscribers is expanding at a reasonable rate, and the market has to deal with issues including competitive prices for such high speed services and new applications such as IPTV and VoIP over broadband.

But compared to other nations, Australia continues to remain a broadband backwater. Independent telecommunications expert Paul Budde says one of the main obstacles to realising the country's true potential in broadband technology is Telstra.

He believes Telstra has to acknowledge public demand soon and bring itself into the forefront of broadband. "I had thought [Telstra CEO] Sol Trujillo would use his time in office to announce a shift in strategy. I had also predicted that part of Telstra's turnaround would be an aggressive launch of its ADSL2+ service, based on a triple-play model, which would include a VoIP and a broadband video offering."

However, that has not happened and as far as Telstra is concerned the telco giant is providing the best broadband services it can - a belief not adhered to by industry experts. "Telstra will upgrade when they have to and it will roll out fibre networks when it sees fit. The telco is running three years behind other countries. What we are going to see is the niche service providers in the market take fibre networks into housing estates and into regional areas," Budde says.

"These niche providers will also be able to provide plenty of broadband applications, which can be run over the network going through the old telephone network. The future of services and the thousands of applications that can be run will come from these service providers."

Simon Hackett, managing director of SA-based service provider Internode, says the only reason the Australian market is seen as lagging behind the US, the UK and some Asia Pacific countries is because organisations like the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) focus on what Telstra is doing and the technology it is offering.

"Telstra is the giant marketing machine that has dominated the media. It is able to give the world the perception that without it no other provider is able to innovate technology," Hackett says.

"That's not true. If you ignore the machine that is Telstra you can see there are service providers like Unwired, Optus, iiNet, Powertel and Pacific Internet offering speeds and technologies far ahead of what Telstra claims is its best effort in providing broadband technology."

Niche service providers

Pacific Internet managing director Dennis Muscat says there are a lot of niche service providers out there quietly doing what Telstra has been failing to achieve - offering faster speeds and services to customers.

"The local broadband market can be split up into two segments: one targeting home and the other business," Muscat says.

"I believe business has maximised the potential of broadband because these companies are seeking wireless for mobility and looking for applications to run over the technology."

However, the residential sector still lags behind because of lack of real competition from Telstra. Muscat says others are trying to build alternative networks but they can never achieve network level on Telstra's scale.

"Australia has generally fallen behind the rest of the region, with OECD figures showing the country is below Canada, Korea and Japan, and lack of competition and investment is highlighted. I think if think if the broadband market was put on a scale between one and 10, we are around three, maybe-three-and-half," Muscat says.

However, broadband packages for business are catching up with the rest of Asia Pacific, Muscat says, and are driving the need for innovators to come up with ways to use broadband to help communication between franchises.

Muscat says companies want to be able to run more applications over a broadband connection, even, potentially, applications to control business like sales automation tools or applications to move information.

"The business sector is continually driving the need for a steady connection to the front door of their company. It's very much like how the telephone once drove business; now it is the internet," he says.

However, the issue of speed is very much on everyone's mind, an issue Budde believes, that is driving Australia to be "well and truly on the road to catching up with the rest of the developed world".

"Internode offers the country's fastest commercial broadband service to customers connected to the East Sydney telephone exchange. ADSL2+, the next generation of ADSL broadband, delivers services with download speeds as fast as 24Mb/s depending on your equipment and the length of the copper line." According to Budde, Telstra's top-speed broadband plan is 1.5Mb/s; another smaller Telstra competitor is offering a 12Mb/s service.

This is a sentiment echoed by Michael Malone, managing director of service provider iiNet. The ISP has gone through some tough times recently and has had to withdraw its 'medium' ADSL1 plan from sale, and has continued to downgrade plans for customers on Telstra infrastructure. "That's only on Telstra's infrastructure. What people don't understand is we are currently rolling out our own 24Mb/s in Perth and Sydney," Malone says.

"A lot of resellers and service providers are increasing their broadband prices for packages based on Telstra's infrastructure."

The latest variant of ADSL, broadly available to the local market for the past couple of months, according to Malone, is ADSL 2+, which provides higher downstream rates of up to 12Mb/s for spans of less than 2.5 km (8000 ft). Flexible framing and error correction configurations are responsible for these increased speeds.

The difference between the two technologies is ADSL 2+ can boost rates up to 24Mb/s for spans of less than 1.5 km (5000 ft) by doubling the downstream spectrum upper limit to 2.2MHz.

It can also offer seamless bonding options, allowing lines with higher attenuation or lower signal to noise ratios (SNRs) to be bonded together to achieve theoretically the sum total of the number of lines (up to 50Mb/s for two lines), as well as options in power management and seamless rate adaptation - changing the data rate used without requiring to resynchronise.