Published on the 30/06/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
After network problems earlier this year, Telstra has announced that it will spend $250 million to attempt to fix the problems…
Unusually the company did not make the announcement to the ASX or via a media release, instead posting a blog by CEO Andy Penn. The sharemarket either didn’t notice or wasn’t fazed as the company shareprice didn’t move a jot.
Investors had been put on notice of Telstra’s capital investment plans back in May when the company announced that it had increased Capex investments to 15 per cent of sales. At the time Penn noted that over the three years to June 2017 the company would have invested more than $5 billion in its mobile network.
At that time it also revealed that it had earmarked a further $50 million to fix the problems in its mobile network that had been revealed during a review after a series of lengthy network failures which began earlier this year.
In the blog post this week Penn said that following the review of its mobile network earlier this year it had also completed an end to end review of its core network and IT systems to identify sources of potential risk.
“As a result of this work we will be investing $250 million from our existing capital program, within our 15 per cent capex to sales ratio, over the next six to 12 months to provide a higher degree of network resilience and improved network performance,” according to Penn.
“As a result of this work we will be investing $250 million from our existing capital program.”
He said the focus would be on enhancing the mobile and core networks’ resilience, boosting real time monitoring and recovery and also increasing ADSL broadband capacity to meet increasing customer demand.
A clue to where that demand was coming from emerged in a new report this week from industry analyst Telsyte. It found that the number of subscription video on demand customers for services delivered over the internet had grown 46 per cent during the last year to 1.9 million.
Telsyte also found that SVOD services typically ate up around 30 per cent of mobile users’ data allowance.
While Telstra may have suffered brickbats over its mobile network performance earlier this year, Australia’s mobile networks in general earned a bouquet or two this week from Akamai.
It released statistics showing that Australia boasted the highest average peak mobile connection speeds in APAC during the first quarter of the year, recording speeds of 147.6 Mbps. Australia was one of four countries, along with Germany, Thailand and Israel with average peak mobile speeds above 100 Mbps. New Zealand recorded average peak mobile speeds of 96 Mbps.
