Telstra has been talking about this for many years – the original network was built in 1990s – but hasn’t moved on it until now, just when the government is more or less ready to announce its national plan for high-speed broadband. We all know that Telstra is not happy with the government’s plans and that it is not going to cooperate with them, so it may not be a coincidence that the announcement has been made at this particular point in time. It certainly will help to spoil that national plan.
Long-term, DOCSIS 3.0 is a dead-end street technology. The whole world is moving towards far greater user participation on the Internet, and two-way video communication. DOCSIS cannot manage services like this adequately. It would in some instances even be inferior to the new copper-based DSL services, let alone to FttH. And while speed is an issue, affordability is a far bigger issue.
Unfortunately, Telstra has a history of spoiling the party – it successfully used this same HFC network to undermine the Optus rollout of similar services. So the odds are in favour of this being a defensive strategy rather than a genuine attempt to improve broadband services.
Short term, however, the biggest question is what price will customers be charged to access this network? Based on Telstra’s mantra of premium networks and premium prices, the end-user price will most likely be out of the reach of most users. BuddeComm thinks it will be aimed at the top 10%, or at the most 15%, of users.
And, finally, in the end also cable networks will need to be upgraded to fibre (FttH). Sol Trujillo himself said that eventually Telstra needs to move to FttH. However, as an interim step towards that goal we accept that there is room for DOCSIS 3.0 – as long as it’s a genuine investment and not one made simply to undermine the NBN.
From an investment point of view it would make sense to first wait what the national decision is and than make your own plans, this begs another question will Telstra really make this investment whatever that national decision is?
As some users in desperate need of better broadband services might choose to jump on the DOCSIS bandwagon this could stop those people from using a truly future-proof high-speed network.
Unless the government comes up with strong regulations to stop Telstra from misusing their networks to undermine the long-term national economic and social interests we could see a serious attempt to derail the government’s a $5 billion broadband investment, and we don’t think this would sell at all well.
source: budde.com.au