The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission today issued Telecommunications Infrastructure in Australia 2002, part of its regular reporting on telecommunications infrastructure in Australia.
"Today's report is based on survey responses from 52 carriers operating in the Australian market during 2001-02", Mr Ed Willett, ACCC Commissioner, said. "This is the second such report issued by the ACCC. The first report, prepared by BIS Shrapnel, was issued in August 2001.
"The report reveals that more than $3.4 billion was invested in Australian telecommunications infrastructure in 2001-02. Investment in local access network infrastructure made up approximately half of this figure. This was followed by mobile networks, transmission networks and xDSL services. Direct comparisons with investment reported in the 2001 report cannot be made because that report combined actual and planned investments over a number of years. However it is evident that a significant proportion of investment planned at that time has not proceeded.
"Telstra accounted for the majority of the $1.8 billion invested in local access network infrastructure in 2001 02.
"The report shows that new carriers had yet to make significant inroads into eroding Telstra's subscriber base which accounted for 85 per cent of subscriber connections across all local access network types* as at the end of June 2002. Collectively, Telstra and SingTel Optus held approximately 99 per cent of all local access network connections.
"This indicates that while many of the newer carriers have deployed local access networks, particularly in CBD and metropolitan areas, most have relatively small networks in terms of subscriber connections.
"It would appear that as a result of previous investment activity, high levels of excess capacity on these networks are constraining ongoing investment by the newer carriers".
Investments in relation to transmission capacity totalled $683 million in 2001-02.
Strong investment by all carriers continues to take place in mobile networks, with carriers investing $818 million over 2001 02 in their GSM and CDMA networks.
At the end of June 2002, there were more than 100 000 xDSL broadband services in operation. Other data collected by the ACCC indicates that by the end of March 2003 the number of services had risen to more than 200,000. While Telstra supplies the majority of these services there is a large number of suppliers, particularly in the CBD and metropolitan areas of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane Adelaide and Perth. Most of these alternative suppliers use wholesale xDSL services acquired from Telstra. Investment in xDSL infrastructure totalled at least $143 million in 2001-02.