Reports today suggest TPG has hit some hitches in its plan to connect lucrative apartment blocks to its own fibre-optic network.

News Corp media outlet The Australian says it has been approached by bodies corporate representing apartment blocks in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

The newspaper claims the building representative reached out to reporters with concerns that TPG’s plans would kill competition for residents.

The reports allege that TPG is exploiting a loophole in the Telecommunications Act, allowing any broadband networks that were in place by January 2011 to be “extended” 1km in length.

It means that TPG can extend a fibre-to-the-basement network in high-rise apartments.

In its push to sink fibre optics into these apartments, TPG has allegedly sent letters to owners’ corporations offering free installation and free internet connections for on-site managers’ offices, to convince them to sign the whole building up to the local telco.

“(TPG) has provided me with notice of its proposed installation and I understand that in certain circumstances I have the right to object to the installation of such facilities,” said one letter published by The Australian.

“I do not wish to make an objection in this case and hereby waive my right to object to this installation.”

The body corporate chairman of the 41-storey high-rise Festival Towers in Brisbane says his building is holding out.

“Earlier this year, TPG served a low-impact notice on the body corporate, saying they were going to barge in and install equipment for the next-generation broadband,” Mr Carlile told News Corp reporters.

“We objected on the basis this was not low impact, and this should be a matter for the body corporate to decide what services we would like in our own building, and not forced upon us.”

“We just want to make sure they can’t lock out all other competitors, which it looked like they were trying to do.

“We want to know what they will do with wholesale prices because we want internet services that will be competitive for our residents.”

By getting in early, the newspaper claims TPG is trying to gain exclusive access to sometimes limited infrastructure.

“If another provider were to install the same technology there is a potential for conflict between the two systems and neither would operate at their full potential speed,” The Australian says TPG wrote in a letter to the Century Towers apartment complex in Sydney’s CBD.

“We are not asking to be the sole internet provider, but the only supplier of vectored-VDSL2 infrastructure within the property. It is more about minimising technical conflict than excluding competition.”

TPG’s apartment plans are being examined by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) and a separate government-appointed panel, which is headed by Michael Vertigan.