As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:
Melbourne-based ISP, Netspace will join the handful of providers that offer high-speed, ADSL2+ broadband to Australian homes. On Tuesday it announced that it has embarked on a national rollout of ADSL2+ technology, and expects to start providing ADSL2+ to new and existing customers within the next three months.
The move comes shortly after Telstra's recently announced impasse with its Fibre-to-the-Node (FTTN) plans. According to Netspace's regulatory affairs manager, Ben Dunscombe, the company was hesitant to make a decision with Telstra's plans still up in the air as there was still some uncertainty as to how the broadband market would react.
"ADSL2+, at its inception point, was a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario," Dunscombe said. "We weren't sure if it was the products [such as streaming video files] that were going to drive the need for high-speed broadband, or if it was the high speed broadband that was enabling new products."
Now, Dunscombe said, "there has been some regulatory clarity with Telstra kicking the FTTN rollout."
"The market has matured a little more now, so the value propositions we can offer our customers have become a little clearer," he said.
The company's cautious approach towards ADSL2+ also involved a beta trial that took place in Melbourne early this year.
"We deployed a number of Melbourne exchanges and with a couple of test cases going forward," Dunscombe said. "It really proved to us that we had the capability to deploy the infrastructure and the technology to support it."
Netspace's ADSL2+ network will operate on a combination of its own new infrastructure and existing framework via wholesale agreements with infrastructure providers that could not be named.
When fully deployed, the combination of new and existing infrastructure is expected to form a network with a breadth and reach of ASL2+ services that rivals any other Australian provider, the company claims.
No details on pricing or when new services will become available have yet been released. However, Dunscombe expects the launch to take place early in the fourth quarter this year.
"It's not expected to be a Christmas present," he said.
