Telstra upgrades exchanges after communities appeal
Telstra group managing director Bruce Akhurst said Telstra had already upgraded 1,080 telephone exchanges to allow customers to use their existing home phone line for broadband.
"We have upgraded 24 telephone exchanges because local communities demonstrated sufficient demand on Telstra's ADSL Demand Register, and another 24 are set to be broadband equipped in coming months as a result of this demand driven scheme," Akhurst said.
Akhurst also said majority of Telstra Wholesale's customers had agreed to new wholesale broadband ADSL price deals.
Telstra also announced that it has completed its upgrade of Victoria's CDMA mobile network to provide high speed wireless data services.
The CDMA 1x enables people to surf the net, access their own office networks, check their e-mail and send and receive data or information using either a compatible mobile phone, or a PDA, laptop or desktop computer, fitted with a suitable card or modem.
Telstra CountryWide together with Loddon-Mallee Health Alliance (LMHA) are seeing the rollout of the latest telecommunications throughout the region.
Telstra country wide regional managing director, Lawrence Paratz, said that work with health groups such as LMHA "has helped spearhead the rollout of CDMA 1x technology throughout regional Victoria."
"The rollout of CDMA 1x is the first stage of a comprehensive technology upgrade for hospitals, medical practitioners and ancillary health services in the LMHA. It also means that services such as CDMA 1x mobile data, which will assist health professionals access files, e-mails and other information from their mobile phones or lap top computers, have been made available sooner and more widely," he said.
The CDMA 1x rollout has been facilitated by the state government, which provided some initial funds through the Customer Access Network (CAN) Demonstration Program to conduct a commercial trial throughout the greater Gippsland area last year.
The LMHA extends from Gisborne to Mildura, incorporating in its initial deployment some 85 sites in both regional and remote locations.