There were suspicions that Australia's copper network was decaying but there has been no attention given to how it was wired.

[Update: a follow up article can be found here.]

An industry insider has told ABC Tech in no uncertain terms that Australia's copper network is "Rooted." The insider has been in the industry for well over a decade and has worked in many different sectors and companies. They didn't want to be named because of the current nature of their work with the rollout of the National Broadband Network and the sensitivities surrounding that.

There were already doubts regarding the physical state of the copper network and its ability to handle the large data throughput of the fastest copper-based broadband technologies. However, apparently, a known, equally-significant hindrance regards the wiring layout itself.

Our insider explained how three years ago, when Telstra tendered the process to switch to their own Fibre to the Node scheme it was found that the average network pillar had a 30 per cent failure rate in terms of line faults and lines being listed as connected to the wrong number.

This made the process of performing a "one-to-one translation" of lines from the current pillars to Fibre to the Node cabinets, completely impractical and is apparently why Telstra gave up on the idea. Telstra has some 65,000 pillars around Australia with many handling communications for around 200 premises.

The problem has arisen because, over the years, when engineers have gone to check line faults it has required them to call into an office to find out where faults lie along the line. However, the process was considered a massive hassle by many engineers who would have to spend some 30 minutes on hold to their own support team. The result was that it became a common practice to connect a home to the nearest free line that was found to be working. However, hardly any of this was documented.

As such, if a one-to-one translation occurred many people would either receive no service because they would be connected to a faulty line or they would be connected to the wrong number. In the latter case, they would not find out until the bill came or when they didn't receive a call that they were expecting. The only way to test for this is to have teams of engineers visit every single house - with one engineer at the house and one at the node/pillar - testing each and every line at enormous expense and taking an enormous amount of time.

In terms of the quality of the copper our insider said it was in a sorry state due to Telstra's maintenance "collapsing over the past five years." He pointed out that some maintenance got done with aluminium cable which is unsuitable for FTTN and it's not uncommon to see fixes made with plastic bags. He re-stated that the great enemy of copper was water and that this has been a problem for Australia because "when it rains, it pisses down."

It puts the implementation of a Fibre to the Node infrastructure (as favoured by the Coalition as an alternative to the NBN's current Fibre to the Premises-based roll out system) further into doubt in regards to its fitness-for-purpose.

Last week contractors for the NBN suggested that adding power to nodes was an expensive hindrance now that they were laying fibre so efficiently. However, Malcolm Turnbull subsequently told Mark Colvin on his PM radio programme that this was "Nonsense." However, he did not elaborate why and instead mentioned that the FTTN rollout by BT in the UK showed that FTTN was three-to-four times cheaper than Fibre to the Premises.

However, BT is now moving away from FTTN and towards FTTP as are other countries including New Zealand and China. A BT representative also told us how there were significant differences between the two countries' existing infrastructures and that they weren't necessarily directly comparable. It remains to be seen how the nuances of Telstra technicians' working practices are mirrored by their British counterparts. More on that in a later article.