Featured, Telecommunications - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 10:42 - 27 Comments

Telstra dumps Naked DSL proposal

news The nation’s largest telco Telstra has confirmed it will not launch naked DSL as a commercial offering, despite conducting a 15 month trial of the product and rivals like iiNet boasting more than 130,000 naked DSL customers.

The company kicked off a trial of naked DSL services in early June 2010, stating that it would conduct a two-year pilot of the services. Although naked DSL, in which broadband is sold without a bundled analogue telephone line, has been offered by rivals like iiNet, Internode and TPG for years – iiNet had some 131,000 naked DSL customers as at the end of June this year – Telstra has so far avoided offering such a service, continuing its practice of requiring customers to bundle telephony with their broadband. The trial marked Telstra’s first move to dip its toe in the naked DSL market.

In a post on Telstra’s customer support forums this week, one Telstra customer, ‘Paul’, wrote that he had been involved in the trial since July 2010, but had not been contacted by Telstra for his feedback on the experience. He enquired whether Telstra would offer a commercial naked DSL service after the trial was completed in July 2012. The response from Telstra employee Gareth (labelled online as a ‘thought leader’ for the telco) was swift.

“… there are no plans currently to extend the pure dsl trial to a commercial offering,” Gareth wrote. “Once the trial expires, the credit will no longer be applied. I do thank you all however for your participation. I could go into detailed reasons why we won’t be progressing to commercial launch but I think this thread adequately covers nearly all of the reasons for the cessation of the trial.”

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