Senator Stephen Conroy Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has announced that Telstra will be providing open access wholesale services through its fibre networks that are currently being deployed in South Brisbane and some new real estate projects that have been launched.
The new Telstra service, known as the “Fibre Broadband Access Service”, will provide a wholesale broadband service to access seekers on request in an open and equal environment and will be subject to oversight by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
Telstra's new multi-coloured logos (Credit: Telstra)
According to Senator Conroy, “Provision of the wholesale service will support competition between service providers on these networks and offer greater choice for end-users,”. Even though this opportunity for broadband to made available in this way has been provided, “the Telstra wholesale broadband service will still be subject to the ACCC’s scrutiny”.
Telstra is striving to provide more options for its customers as it recently changed its layout and format for its bills as one of its ways of assisting the company become more customer friendly.
The provision of the wholesale service that Telstra will be providing was a condition of the networks being exempted from regulatory arrangements, section 7 and 8 of the Telecommunications Act 1997.
Senator Conroy has stipulated that the arrangements for the wholesale fibre networks would be provisional, pending the rollout of the National Broadband and Telstra’s long term structural separation relating to networks that Telstra had been contracted to build before sections 7 and 8 of the 1997 Act were put it place.
The arrangements for this new service will come into effect in April of this year.
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