Thursday, June 24, 2004
Far north coast
Recently, because of work I had to attend a series of field days held at Casino NSW. I was there to demonstrate internet products for the company I am contracted to work for an gauge the viabilities of broadband services in that area.
What we discovered is that many of the rural towns and even some of the major centres on the North Coast and inland from the coast don’t yet have ADSL broadband and some of the exchanges in these areas are incapable of supporting such services because of the type of equipment used to feed residences and business houses.
Kyogle is a relatively large township in a very large shire and the town itself does not have an exchange capable of supporting broadband services. The exchange does however, support high speed narrowband services like dual channel 64k ISDN which gives a customer 128k. Still this is to some get out and push internet speeds!
Another problem we found was the ADSL register where ISP’s go to register their customers interests with Telstra wholesale was not accurate. Sure it might give you the current level of interest (although we are not sure about that one) it does not on many exchanges even indicate the number of people needed to make and exchange viable. If this information was made available I am sure achievable targets could be met easily, but maybe that is the idea, maybe they are scared if the info becomes available there will be rush on exchange areas meeting target levels of interest or customers and maybe it might mean spending a bit to much capital.
But to be fair, a lot of the technologies install were installed ten years ago before things like 56k v90 modems were even around. This means a customer using the internet would accept a 31200 connection as being good and with out any thought of broadband services in the future. Seems strange that the phone companies let this happened considering ADSL is a 15 year old technology and now we are seeing many of the current installed RIM exchanges and subdivisions cannot support ADSL services. These guys are stuck with high speed narrow band services such as 128k ISDN. It’s a shame they won’t just run fibre directly into the houses.
From what I heard and saw when I was up in the Northern Rivers and Richmond Valley area it looks like some of these towns are going to have to wait a long time before broadband services come their way if they ever do.
What we discovered is that many of the rural towns and even some of the major centres on the North Coast and inland from the coast don’t yet have ADSL broadband and some of the exchanges in these areas are incapable of supporting such services because of the type of equipment used to feed residences and business houses.
Kyogle is a relatively large township in a very large shire and the town itself does not have an exchange capable of supporting broadband services. The exchange does however, support high speed narrowband services like dual channel 64k ISDN which gives a customer 128k. Still this is to some get out and push internet speeds!
Another problem we found was the ADSL register where ISP’s go to register their customers interests with Telstra wholesale was not accurate. Sure it might give you the current level of interest (although we are not sure about that one) it does not on many exchanges even indicate the number of people needed to make and exchange viable. If this information was made available I am sure achievable targets could be met easily, but maybe that is the idea, maybe they are scared if the info becomes available there will be rush on exchange areas meeting target levels of interest or customers and maybe it might mean spending a bit to much capital.
But to be fair, a lot of the technologies install were installed ten years ago before things like 56k v90 modems were even around. This means a customer using the internet would accept a 31200 connection as being good and with out any thought of broadband services in the future. Seems strange that the phone companies let this happened considering ADSL is a 15 year old technology and now we are seeing many of the current installed RIM exchanges and subdivisions cannot support ADSL services. These guys are stuck with high speed narrow band services such as 128k ISDN. It’s a shame they won’t just run fibre directly into the houses.
From what I heard and saw when I was up in the Northern Rivers and Richmond Valley area it looks like some of these towns are going to have to wait a long time before broadband services come their way if they ever do.
# posted by Peter Saville - IT Consultant @ 1:39 AM 
