By PAUL BRISLEN
The introduction of a competitive high-speed internet access market has hit another roadblock.
Telecom cannot deliver its promised wholesale service on time.
Telecom has been working with internet providers on its "unbundled bitstream service" (UBS) for four months and was to have introduced its service towards the end of this
month.
But technical problems mean it won't be able to offer the full service by then and won't have a solution for five weeks or longer, says its manager of strategy and planning for wholesale, Martin Butler.
"It's at least five weeks and possibly up to three months. With Christmas in the middle, we could run into difficulty if we haven't got it fixed before the holiday period."
Butler said Telecom would offer an interim solution to providers, but it would not have the full functionality of the planned wholesale service.
"UBS is switched at layer two of the network stack," he said.
"The interim service will be a layer three service."
A layer two service would give internet providers total control over the service offered.
Layer three means Telecom retains control of the quality of service and authentication and means the internet providers won't be able to build their own functionality on top of the basic Telecom offer.
"They won't be able to offer services like throttle on cap, for example."
Throttle on cap is an industry term which means users who reach their traffic limit for the month have their connection speed limited instead of being cut off or charged more.
Auckland internet provider Ihug has already announced its planned offerings under the UBS banner and was proposing a throttled service.
Ihug's two home plans have traffic limits of 2GB (gigabytes) and 20GB a month.
Users who exceed their limits would be throttled back from 256 kbps (kilobits per second) to 64 kbps.
But Telecom's interim solution won't allow that to happen.
Ihug general manager Guy Nelson wasn't willing to comment until he had spoken to Telecom and his technical staff.
