Telstra InfraCo opens up 'carrier-neutral data centres' in Sydney and Melbourne
The veil on the Telstra monolith has been slightly lifted, with Telstra InfraCo announcing on Wednesday it would create a pair of carrier-neutral data centres in Sydney and Melbourne.
While initially only available through Telstra Wholesale, the company said the centres would provide "greater flexibility for customers working with other carriers for their connectivity". Depending on uptake of the offering, InfraCo could roll it out to another seven data centres, it added.
"InfraCo data centres provide highly secure, reliable, and flexible environments for network operators and service providers, such as global carriers, internet service providers and over the top providers, to connect out to their business locations, facilities and other data centre operators," said Telstra's InfraCo Exchanges & Infrastructure executive Rachel Johnson-Kelly.
"These Data Centres provide 100% power availability targets, which are backed by service levels and rebates. They use dual grid feeds with state-of-the-art equipment and support for high power densities, allowing customers to scale on request, without the need to re-configure powering requirements to deliver big data analytic services and peak workloads."
The company also said InfraCo would own or have renewable energy generation contracts equal to all the energy use used in its entire operations.
Last year, Telstra as a whole was certified as carbon neutral, saying at the time it was difficult to purchase carbon offsets from local projects.
See also: Blaming China is handy when trying to keep telco infrastructure away from Beijing
In November, Telstra announced it would be restructuring into fixed, tower, and service entities. The service entity would gain the bulk of Telstra, owning its retail business, active electronics and radio access network, spectrum, as well as offering services and products to customers. However, the existing Telstra corporate body and its debt would sit with InfraCo Fixed. It later said it would create an arm to hold its international assets.
Telstra brought forward a AU$2.8 billion sale of part of its InfraCo Towers business last month after being approached by a consortium including the Future Fund, Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation, and Sunsuper.
Once the deal is closed, which is expected to happen in the first quarter of fiscal year 2022, InfraCo Towers will have no debt and a 15-year deal with extension options for Telstra to use its infrastructure.
Earlier in the year, InfraCo opened up its dark fibre network, offering 250 pre-defined paths across six state capitals that connected to 68 metro data centres, 78 NBN points of interconnect, and two cable landing stations.
The company recently confirmed it was approached by the Australian government to purchase Digicel Pacific, with the government set to stump up "significant funding" for any transaction.
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