It will use energy utility ETSA Telecom's fibre-optic cable to avoid Telstra's expensive backhaul to exchanges, where it is installing DSLAMs capable of providing 24Mbit/s ADSL2+ speeds.

The new ADSL2+ services will be available in early 2005 with the rollout complete by August. People living within a kilometre or so of an Adam-enabled exchange should be able to get speeds up to 24Mbit/s. Most other people will get speeds around 12Mbit/s - still faster than the best residential broadband available today.

In an agreement with ETSA Telecom, Adam Internet will have fibre links to most exchanges in the Adelaide area by May 2005. It will cost $9.6million to install DSLAMs into the 24 exchanges, with the fibre links ensuring it will almost completely avoid the Telstra network.

The DSLAMs being used by Adam will allow some people rejected by Telstra for ADSL to get slower speed services. Currently Telstra Wholesale rejects customers who are too far from an exchange to support 1.5Mbit/s speeds, even if the customer would be happy with a 256Kbit/s service.

As part of their move Adam Internet will be migrating its existing customers to this new infrastructure. “We value our current customers” Hr Hicks said, “once an exchange becomes active we will migrate them to this faster network for free”. Adam Internet has defined this statement of “existing customers” as those that were connected to it’s ADSL network prior to 17 April 2005. This is because of the massive influx of customers that this announcement is expected to cause. Currently, no other ISP in Adelaide has announced such a high density ADSL2+ network. Customers joining after the 17th will be required to pay $90 for this migration.

“Customers being moved on to this new network will experience minor outage of 10-15 Minutes” according to Mr Hicks, “Telstra will be conducting the migration on our behalf”. This statement is significant as previous migrations on other networks have resulted in customers experiencing outages for days. “We have provided our customers with emergency dial-up to deal with this contingency but believe our planning will make it a smooth operation. Adam Internet’s planned migration starts on the 20 June 2005.

Once customers are migrated they will have access to a range of new services including uncapped broadband speeds, Movies on Demand and defines the “Next Generation” of ADSL services.