Telstra to spend $250 million on networks
Telstra will spend $250 million over the next 6-12 months in an attempt to build more resilience into both its fixed and mobile networks.
The move comes as technical problems continue to plague both fixed and mobile networks. Indeed the latest outage, in Melbourne, came just days after the investment announcement late last month.
Announcing the spend, Telstra CEO Andy Penn said that $50 million would be put into the improving real time monitoring and recovery time in the mobile network, $100 million into expanding ADSL capacity and $100 into enhancing resiliency in the core network.
The $250 million is not additional to the total capital expenditure budget and includes the $50 million on mobiles announced in May, but it does represent a targeted response to the series of outages that occurred earlier this year.
Penn pointed out that investment in ADSL services would have to be “carefully targeted” given that the access network is being progressively taken over by the NBN. But he said that it would still be possible to invest in new platforms, “run them in ADSL mode” and then re-use that capacity to deliver other services in an NBN world.
“What we’re responding to is increasing growth and demand, and what we’ve been seeing is 50% increases year-on-year in traffic, and that hasn’t backed off,” added Telstra GMD for networks, Mike Wright. “We’re really responding to what customers want to do with our network, so we can maintain reliability, and that is largely within the core..”.
Source: Communications Day
