Port Augusta council unveils ADSL2+, optical desire

The council -- which employs over 300 people in its rural South Australia location -- is looking to build a new high-speed wide area network between its 16 locations, to provide data and eventually voice services. While such installations have traditionally been based on ISDN, the council's director of corporate services, Michael Dunemann, says that's not good enough.

"ISDN is not cheap and not very fast," he told ZDNet Australia . This problem left the council looking at alternatives such as wireless -- which Dunemann said was expensive -- or the new breed of ADSL technologies.

The council stipulated further in documents detailing its requirements that it desired a solution utilising "carrier-grade optical fibre".

Although the ADSL2+ standards have only recently been finalised, Dunemann is not worried about the risks typically associated with early-adoption.

"I'd be crazy to not take a look and see what the market has to offer. We see it only as an extension of ADSL," he said. "This stuff's been around for yonks -- I don't see that it's going to be an issue."

Dunemann's only concerns relate to the ability of the market to deliver what his organisation is plainly interested in buying.

"We're only seeking expressions of interest to see what is available, because I understand that Telstra probably aren't going to deliver [ADSL2+ services] for a year or so, and I'm not even that sure of how many [companies] are going to be able to deliver -- if any," he said.

"We understand that this is very, very new and it may well come out that a viable, robust solution with minimal risk is not yet available."

The director highlighted Internet provider Internode -- which recently was the first to market with ADSL2+ services -- as one potential services provider, and said he had a couple of others in mind.