I could barely do my online work whilst I was down at Victor Harbor this week. Although this coastal town is on the urban rim of Adelaide, we are only able to access ADSL because of Telstra. The backhaul transmission link is owned by Telstra and it is the only link. Telstra is a monopolist and it has not time for the regions, other than to prevent a competitive market emerging.

After the recent storms the internet was clogged up or blocked. I could barely post. It would take ages to download and I could barely upload material to my weblogs. It had been like that on the weekend and it continued all week. It was hopeless to work with.

Was it the backhaul transmission link to Adelaide that was causing the bottleneck problem? Or the "last mile" Telstra line to the exchange? I had no idea, as the connection was so slow I couldn't get out to the Internode website to see what was happening. The telecommunications problems faced by regional consumers are particularly stubborn, and they have been used as a ransom note in conflicts between Telstra and Government for a decade or more.

Telstra management say that they are simply determined to try to maximize profits once they'd been privatised, and that the regions didn’t fit in that picture.They would rather not have to invest in these low-margin, high cost customers, even though it has banked banks billions in profits a year. As an effective monopolist Telstra saw the consumer pressure for better services in regions as leverage for either more money in subsidies, greater regulatory advantage, or both.

Telstra has turned on ADSL2 where customers could buy it from someone else. If you were lucky enough to have a competitor investing in your exchange, Telstra would rush to follow. But the cost to competitors to use Telstra backhaul line was kept high enough to prevent them from investing in an ADSL2+ network. So broadband competitors are locked out of regional markets because the price just to get to many towns is prohibitive. There’s one road in to town, and Telstra sets the toll.

Little events like this indicate why we need the backhaul monopoly broken.This is being done with a national broadband network with its fibre-to-the-home and altenative backhaul built to fix the blackspots. Victor Harbor is one of the blackspots, and we need a backhaul link is genuinely competitive. An alternative backhaul transmission link is being built. It cannot come soon enough.

What happens next after March 2011 when the alternative backhaul transmission link has been built? Does it make sense for an ISP business like Internode to continue to invest in DSLAMs that use the old copper network when a new fibre, wireless and satellite network is coming along? If iTelstra decides to play hard ball, it could take two years for a new DSLAM investment by Internode to get switched on.

Telstra’s strategy is to try to bind competitors to its ADSL2+ wholesale service, rather than them to invest in DSLAMs in its regional exchange. It reckons that it has market power in regional locations and it determined to hold on to it. Tha tis why we need a national broadband network with Telstra as just a retailer.