How Telstra'a Universal Service Obligation (USO) will be met

Nationals leader, Mark Vale, is making noises about holding the government to its legislated obligation to provide telephone services in rural areas comparable with city services.

While those of us who live in poorly serviced areas have seen no effort to upgrade the local telephone infrastructure, I believe the USO will be met with new technology. Those degraded copper lines to your telephone exchange will never be replaced as they will become redundant as will the exchange itself.

Since connecting to the HIBIS subsidised broadband Internet service, I have been exposed to the future of telecommunications with a technology known as the Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) which allows you to talk to any telephone in the world through your Internet connection.

Currently, this technology is being offered by third party developers with costs as low as 3 cents/minute for international calls to landline phones and free to Internet phones anywhere in the world. If this technology remains in third party hands, the Telcos will lose too much business. Whilst Telstra downplays the VOIP system, they have indicated they will provide a similar service next year.

Whilst this technology is still developing, it will get better. At the moment, using the satellite produces delays similar to those you see on satellite interviews on television current affairs programs. That is not good enough for a traditional telephone service and it probably never will be.

However, the real future will be using the VOIP telphone system in conjunction with radio Internet services which are still in their infancy. This will give you a service as good or better than the current CDMA mobile phone system at better than landline costs.

When you read Mark Vale's chest-beating demands of the new CEO of Telstra, Sol Trujillo, you can see that he too realises that new technology is the way to meet the USO.

In the meantime, (a year or so), I expect the government to dodge and weave and do nothing until the technology is ready. It may not happen tomorrow, but it will happen.

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