The Drama of Living in an Australian Fibre ‘Only’ Connected Community

The Drama of Living in an Australian Fibre ‘Only’ Connected Community.

Melbourne Australia
8 November 2011

by Loren

I recently spent some time helping a friend of mine build a new house in Melbourne. At the end of it all came managing the telecommunications aspect (my specialty). The bottom line of it all was this.

A new community of hundreds of homes, the developer in Point Cook, Melbourne chose Opticom vs. Telstra to provide connectivity for IPTV including Internet.

The hypothetical upside is the whole area has fibre. The downside, the whole area has no copper; the fibre is managed by the developer that has set themselves up as ISP and they are offering a high price for a poor product (they are contending the product so the product is the same as DSL but at 400% of the price).

This means they are offering 12mb for $200 per month with 100GB download. I currently pay $60 for unlimited download via TPG.

Calls to try and get any copper or alternative seem to be fruitless thus far. The next route, includes local MP, and Telstra might be able to offer help via thorough cost analysis, and then it might be down to a class action law suit, not just in Melbourne but nationally, a mess at best.

So will it be any different with the NBN. I spoke to them recently with all of this in mind, they were vague but my understanding (needs to be verified) is it could happen again if another developer was to do what this developer did with Opticom.

The developer said the only role Opticom apparently had here was offering an infrastructure, where Telstra refused.

I suggested to the developer that they are trying to get their money out of their investment (customers) too fast, not the right sort of ROI. This is falling on deaf ears so far.