The carrier said that the plan would see an 8Mbps ADSL service offered to around 250,000 homes and businesses that currently only have access to satellite based internet service, expanding its terrestrial broadband coverage from 91 per cent to 95 per cent of the population.

“This ADSL broadband rollout would mean that even remote outback towns would for the first time be able to enjoy all of the social and economic benefits that come from being connected to high speed broadband,” Telstra Country Wide group managing director Geoff Booth said.

Australian IT: Pollies get broadband push

This is a great idea, the communications infrastructure in the bush is pretty bad. Reliable phone connections are rare, never mind the internet.  There doesn’t seem to be any time frame attached to this plan mentioned in the article, but if it was going to happen, it should be soon.

If it did happen soon however, you would have the very odd situation of “remote outback towns” having access to ADSL2 connections while Penrith still can’t get it? We’re not even on the ‘planned’ list. And according to this article, Telstra isn’t allowed to install ADSL2 onto an exchange unless a competitor does it too.

Regulatory constraints will limit the 20Mbps service to exchanges where competitors are also offering those higher speeds.

Although another article paints a very different picture:

In a direct response to Telstra boss Sol Trujillo’s criticism of broadband investment a day earlier, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s chairman, Graeme Samuel, called for the telecom to offer its highest speed of ADSL2+ to “the vast majority of Australians, as you can do”.

“Stop using the now overplayed excuse of ‘regulatory constraints’ as a subterfuge, in the hope that you might be able to persuade our politicians to remove regulations designed to foster and promote competition,” he told Telstra in a speech to a broadband conference in Sydney.

…

Telstra has said it wanted a “definitive assurance” from the ACCC that it would not be forced to give rivals access to the ADSL2+ network at too cheap a rate.

 This looks like yet another case of the government and Telstra pointing at each other yelling “He did it!”.  My kids do that and I don’t put up with it, why do we allow these guys to get away with it?  Come on Senator Coonan, lets see some real action here.  The parts of Australia not inside a capital city’s CBD need decent connectivity too.