Broadband Access... to homes, businesses and people on the move

Bandwidth requirements are exploding due to the growing availability and use of media rich applications and services. File downloads and video streaming are just two examples. This appetite for more bandwidth is placing increasing demands on TELUS' access network, the portion of the network that connects to the customer's residence, place of business or mobile location. TELUS' Broadband Access strategic technology thrust provides near-term and long-range deployment strategies to meet the increasing bandwidth requirements.

For residential customers a multi-staged progression is underway at TELUS that pushes high bandwidth fibre-optic network closer to the customer residence. This effectively shortens or eliminates the copper loop portion of the access which as a result enables higher peak bandwidths to be achieved on the access, both upstream and downstream. It also results in increased coverage making high-speed Internet and video services available to more customers. TELUS has been upgrading from ADSL (Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line) to ADSL2+ technology to enable IPTV-based television and video-on-demand services. TELUS is also trialing VDSL2 and GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) technology which promises to increase residential broadband access speeds even further and enable multiple concurrent high-definition video streams and even faster high-speed unshared Internet service.

For business customers requiring business voice, LAN (Local Area Network) interconnect and/or other business services a multi-staged progression is also underway to provide a variety of broadband access choices ranging from DSL to optical ethernet based services at megabit to gigabit speeds. This enables the rationalization of legacy business voice and data services to more advanced and effective IP-based services.

For customers on the move TELUS is deploying 2G (second generation) and 3G (third generation) wireless technologies to make advanced voice, messaging, multimedia and Internet services available anywhere. TELUS' wireless high-speed EVDO (Evolution Data Optimised) network supports average data speeds of 400 Kbps and maximum up to 1.5 Mbps.