Telstra InfraCo has sworn to open up more contemporary measures for customers to have access to its infrastructure. 

According to CEO Brendon Riley, the unit was transitioning to business operations and asset monetisation from business building. “We really do want to make infrastructure more accessible to all of you,” he told the audience as he addressed the CommsDay Melbourne Congress. 

He further added that even if Telstra remains to be an important customer, all the principles that InfraCo approaches apply to its parent are applied to everyone in the market. “We’re making sure that all of the relationships we have a real partnership relationship...We were recently successful in a joint bid with Optus in Connecting Victoria to build mobile assets and solutions.”

InfraCo has already kicked off its five-year national fibre network upgrade in Bakers Hill, WA. This is seen to add a dual path of more than 20,000 route kilometres - Orange NSW build is imminent. 

Riley said that additional launches in FY22 will expand its dark fibre into more cities. “We've got a pretty unique footprint, beyond the fibre, both all of the access points that you would need and we've commenced build on our inner capital fibre network,” the CEO said.

He also added that dark fibre is a great benchmark for launching a service to monetise its assets with new infrastructure-based services. “[Initially] a lot of people wanted us to supply dark fibre [but] we weren’t in the dark fibre business. Indeed, [Telstra] Enterprise was buying dark fibre from Vocus.”

“Combining our fibre footprint and fixed network assets provides unique opportunities for our customers,” he said. This includes “unique connectivity” to critical infrastructure with more than 300 pre-defined fibre paths.

“If you want to build an edge, well guess what?, we've already got the locations and most of them have got fibre connectivity to them as well,” he further added.

“It was pretty clear we felt at the time that the sum of the parts was worth more than the market cap. So there's an opportunity to draw some value,” he also said. “We had to improve the access to infrastructure, not always easy to access in some cases, we didn't even have offerings that we could price for you and some of the infrastructure was getting a bit old and unloved...we needed to give it a lot more love,” he further added.

“When we used that word initially, basically the media reported that it was our secret plan to take over the NBN and merge with InfraCo. Now I've not spent one second of my time on that. It's more about the structures that we have, the investment models and really creating an overall model for InfraCo that's very flexible as things change over time.”