Union rebuffs Telstra over copper "disgrace"

A union official has labelled Telstra's copper network an "absolute disgrace" after the telco defended the network and blamed the weather for a rise in service disruptions.

Stuart Lee, the group executive of Telstra Wholesale, last week denied that Telstra's copper network is "ageing".

"The other thing that makes me cross when I hear it, and I see it a lot in the press, is the talk of the ageing copper network. It's not. It's not an ageing copper network. It's like grandfather's axe; it's had five new handles and three new heads. When it breaks, we replace the broken bit. So it's much the same as it always has been and always will be," Lee said.

"It's just an older technology, it's not that the asset itself has deteriorated."

Lee denied that a rise in mass service disruptions on the copper network was a sign that the network had deteriorated. Instead, he blamed weather events for the increase.

"Service disruptions are not going up and up and up. They correlate to weather events, and the weather events we've had in the last nasty season are about five to six times the previous ones, so - surprise, surprise - there is a lot more damage," Lee is quoted as saying in The Australian.

Also last week, NBN Co executive chairman and one-time Telstra CEO Ziggy Switkowski told a Senate Estimates hearing that the copper network "continues to perform robustly".

But his statement came with a caveat and was delivered alongside speculation.

"Clearly I don't have recent Telstra information except anecdotal material, and my feeling is the network in 2013, the fault rate might be higher than it was in the time I was at Telstra, but perhaps not materially higher and hard to disengage from weather patterns. Fault rates in the early part of the last decade were lower because it was drier. When it gets wetter, that exposes the copper to some extent," Switkowski said.

"As best as I can tell, the copper network continues to perform robustly and without knowing the number, Telstra must have millions of broadband customers using ADSL on copper delivering speeds of up to 10 Mbps.

"That suggests to me that the network is robust still and the concerns that are expressed that the network may not be the basis for the next generation of broadband platform, I think, are misinformed," he said.

He said that the amount of the copper network that was unsuitable for FTTN is "a question in front of us".

"We have most recently started a process of working with Telstra on a pilot approach which will give us more information about fibre to the node on a copper network, how to scale it, and may well reveal if there are unanticipated issues with the network," he said.

But Shane Murphy, assistant secretary of the NSW branch of the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union (CEPU) - a union that represents Telstra field staff - vehemently disagreed with Lee's assessment of the copper network.

"Replacing the broken bit right now would be [just about] replacing the [whole] network," Murphy said.

"The network is an absolute disgrace," he said. "It's full of plastic bags [and] ring-barked cables."

The CEPU reportedly has photographs that appear to show Telstra pits in which plastic bottles and bags have been used to insulate wires.

"It doesn't matter which capital city of the country you live in, or country town, as soon as they get a dosage of rain, up goes the amount of outages of customer services or internet faults. And that is due to the state of the Telstra network. It is nearly beyond repair," Murphy said.

According to Murphy, Telstra would have to invest "millions and millions" of dollars on the network to allow it to survive the next 20 years.

"The union finds it alarming that the CEO or anyone within Telstra believes the copper network is in shape to last another 100 years," he said.

The state of Telstra's copper network is important to the Coalition's preferred FTTN-based model for the NBN. Critics say the network has deteriorated beyond the point where it can be used to support high-speed downloads.

Pictured: Telstra's Stuart Lee. Image courtesy of Telstra.