Speaking at the Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA) National Congress in Brisbane, Holly Kramer, Group Managing Director - Telstra Product Management, announced to a group of property developers that the Velocity fibre optic solution for new housing developments will be upgraded by Christmas.
This announcement comes a month after Internode announced in February its launch of 100Mbps Internet services in conjunction with open access network provider OptiComm. They are already deploying up to 100Mbps speeds today in an estate in Queensland and will be rolled out to another 12 estates before the end of this year, so Telstra's claim during the announcement of "providing the fastest broadband in Australia" is not correct.
Geoff Booth, Group Managing Director, Telstra Country Wide explained that Telstra had connected some 3100 homes to the Velocity network already and had some 100,000 plus lots under contract; although looking at a number of these estates some are 3-5 years away from starting.
Ms Kramer went on to publicly apologise for the poor performance many residents have experience on service delivery when connecting to the Velocity network - this is the first time Telstra have admitted any such problems. She promised Telstra would improve the customer connection experience in future.
Telstra did not announce any pricing on the proposed Velocity 100Mbps services, only that "we will align our Velocity FTTH network with HFC both in terms of speed and customer offering". This would suggest that a 100Mbps Velocity service will only offer a 2Mbps upstream speeds as is the case with HFC. Residents are likely to have to wait until December before pricing on the new products are released while Internode and Opticomm are today delivering 100Mbps for only $99 per month.
2 comments:
- At 04 April, 2009 10:21 Anonymous said...
-
After reading the story on nowwearetalking, it almost sounds like that they are going to align the prices of their HFC network and the velocity network- if this is the case this is great news!
While of course it is not perfect, as there is no open access, or even wholesale access- price parity with the HFC network is a much more equitable pricing model, and while I would prefer a choice of ISP, I will accept this offering graciously. - At 05 April, 2009 12:18 Anonymous said...
-
The line from Telstra's site said "Today we are announcing that we will align our Velocity FTTH network with HFC both in terms of speed and customer offering"
Does quite say price.
But if that is correct and Telstra stops gouging Velocity customers with over priced services, this would be a good outcome.
I'm glad you think $70 per month is a reasonable price for the Liberty account, when you can get the same elsewhere for unles $50. I think many would disagree.
The cheaper accounts while competitively priced are only offering 200-500Mbytes a month, hardly sufficent for a fibre network.
I would also note that this means the upgrades are only going to occur in Melbourne/Victoria first before the rest of the country - in line with the HFC upgrades.
