www.WirelessFederation.com/news: The broadband subsidiary of Australian fixed line incumbent Telstra, the BigPond has started a four- to six-week trial of naked DSL services with a view to assessing customer demand. Two different naked DSL products have been tested by Telstra including an enhanced version, offered under the ‘Pure DSL’ banner, which allows customers to receive incoming calls and make outbound emergency calls.

Traditional naked DSL with no dial tone is also offered by Telstra and there would be no additional cost for the version allowing limited call access in order to ascertain the importance of the extra feature. Telstra will offer only one tariff as a part of the trails i.e. downlink speeds of up to 20Mbps with a 25GB data usage limit for AUD59.95 (USD50.11) per month on a 24-month contract.

According to Telstra spokesperson Craig Middleton, initially the offer will only be available to ‘a few thousand’, and responding to queries about whether Telstra would offer the service to wholesale customers in the future and that would be assessed at the end of the pilot programme.