Telstra holding customers back from higher speeds, ISPs claim

Several of Australia's largest ISPs are saying that Telstra could give up to 8Mbit/s ADSL speeds to broadband consumers right now, and could have 5 years ago when ADSL was first introduced. But Telstra says there's no demand for higher speeds.

According to Internode managing director Simon Hackett, "Telstra's national ADSL infrastructure can run at 8Mbit/s today, but they consistently made a business decision not to run it at high speed. One of the main reasons that you're seeing people like us building alternative DSLAM rollouts is sheer frustration with not being able to turn up the volume."

Hackett says his company has been requesting higher ADSL speeds from Telstra for 4-5 years, ever since ADSL became available in Australia. Most recently, Internode asked Telstra for higher speeds "about a month or two ago". Telstra, according to Hackett, consistently claims there's no demand for higher speeds.

And Stuart Marburg, who is managing director of competing ISP Netspace, completely agrees with Hackett. Marburg told ZDNet Australia this week that: "We've asked for higher speeds and we've been very vocal in that for the last few years. Telstra in the past has been non-committal when or if they'll give us the high speeds. When I hear that they're upgrading their network, that sounds great, but they can turn the high speeds on now. Let's do it."