I am writing to the Senate inquiry after
becoming totally frustrated with my attempts to obtain an ADSL broadband
connection for use by my consulting engineering practice.
We operate from an office attached to my home at Prince Henry Heights,
which is only about 5 minutes travel from the centre of
Toowoomba.
We have three telephone lines into the premises, two
business and one private. We also operate two CDMA phones and a digital
phone. All of these services plus our internet access are with
Telstra - in fact I have never dealt with anyone else because I believed that
Telstra were there to look after the whole of the country, not just to pick the
eyes out of the more lucrative city markets.
Of late I have been finding that the cost of our
internet access has been increasing, principally due to call drop-outs, as we
are on a fixed monthly plan with BigPond. I have made several attempts to
be connected to the ADSL broadband service because I believe that it would be an
ideal and cost effective method of accessing the internet. We have
large drawing files and specification documents to upload and download to and
from our off site sub-consultants.
Several months ago I was told on application to
Telstra for ADSL that, "No, we can't provide that service yet, but
it is coming." Over the last few weeks there has been a concerted
advertising effort by Telstra extolling the virtues of broadband
connection, complete with images of a speeding train. This convinced me to
try again.
On 5 June I rang the 1800 151 311 number as per
the advertisement in the Courier Mail to obtain my "faster
affordable internet experience", only to be told that,
despite my close proximity to the centre of a large regional centre like
Toowoomba, I was unable to obtain an ADSL connection because we have "a pair
gain phone line system", and, "You can't expect to just ring up and get
that sort of service like you would a telephone." Of course, for a
lot more money I could get a two-way satellite link - "faster"
of course, but hardly falling into the category of
"affordable". I believe that the current round of BigPond
broadband advertisements must almost be verging on false and misleading
advertising.
I made contact with the electorate office of my
local member of parliament and dealt with a very helpful aide who made contact
with the local Telstra Countrywide office. One of the Countrywide staff
then rang me back to correct some of the mis-information that I had been given
during my previous telephone contact with Telstra. It appears that we have
standard telephone lines, but are unable to access ADSL because we have a line
length of 4800 metres, and the service will only reliably work
up to a line length of 4000 metres from the telephone
exchange.
What sort of second class service is the government
accepting from Telstra on our behalf? If this is the level of service
offered in Toowoomba, a headquarters for Telstra Countrywide, what
service are people getting further out? We need to be able to have
very similar, if not the same, level of internet access available in the country
as in the capital cities. This also needs to be at a similar cost if we
are to be competitive with our city cousins. It seems incredible that
Telstra are spending such huge sums of money advertising this product when it
has such a restrictive physical constraint. I believe that the advertising
is more for the politicians' benefit, so that you can see how readily available
this service is, rather than for the consumers' benefit.