Telstra Kicked Out of $15bn Broadband Project

An anonymous reader writes "Australia's largest telco and ISP, Telstra, has been kicked out of the bidding process to build a national broadband network (NBN) estimated to be worth $15 billion. The Aussie government had earlier given assurances that the proposal would be considered, however it now won't even be evaluated by the expert panel, which will make the recommendations to the Senator for Broadband and Communications. The government may now take steps to legislate so that Telstra can't build a network that competes with the NBN — leaving the incumbent to focus on wireless HSPA+ technology instead."

Comments

Re:Senator Conroy's handiwork

[Anonymous Coward]

Plenty of other ISP's have refused to participate. ISP's who have like iiNet have publically bagged the entire process.

I think you are really reaching if you think the two are related.

Re:What about competition?

[dbIII]

They wanted to prove that they were not bound by the same rules as everyone else by not putting in a bid but expecting to be chosen anyway. If that had happened they would get to dictate their own terms. No government with even half of a clue would let this happen. The previous government dealt with it by pretending that it was not their problem even when they owned all and then most of Telstra. The current government still owns a lot of it (future fund) but their is some weird arrangement where they are not allowed to vote as if they are a shareholder left over from the previous government.

For those outside Australia Telstra can best be summed up as a combination of some of the worst aspects of the government organisation which it was and the worst aspects of a private telecommunications monopoly that it has become. Add to that a fully imported management team of executative with spectacular failures behind them of the sort that think slavery is a good idea and experise in anything is for the peasants. One was infamous for repeatedly refering to the remaining Australian management and the Australian staff as "savages".

If it wasn't close to a monopoly it would have gone the way of Enron long ago due to being run the same way.

Re:non compliant

[solanum]

Mod parent up. This is all part of Telstra's brinkmanship with the government here. They tried the same thing with ADSL2, where they wanted permission to exclude/charge higher prices to competitors (despite having a monopoly on the 'last mile', so delayed making ADSL2 available to the public. In the end, the main competitors got together and put their own ADSL2 DSLAMS in place, so Telstra were forced to start allowing users onto their ADSL2 network after all.

In this case Telstra claim no one else can do it other than them, so have refused to put a proper bid in in the hope they can get more out of the government.

Re:What about competition?

[tux0r]

I beg to differ.

Consider that the competitor may (yeah, I know, work with me) be able to provide a tender for a FTTH solution, as opposed to the rather short-sighted FTTN solutions bandied about. (Axia has been talking about FTTH for their bid.)

Suddenly there's no issue with Telstra - the whole legacy copper network is leapfrogged. Competition on pricing and/or quotas rages. Australia is future-proofed and Telstra has to come up with another (distinguishable) technology to stay in the game.

I realise this is not an overnight solution, but we should all be thinking further than ten years into the future. I am very hopeful that FTTH becomes a reality with the new Australian NBN, and now that Telstra is out, it's just that little bit more likely...

Re:Senator Conroy's handiwork

[mister_tim]

Or rather:

3) Telstra submitted a non-conforming tender and the Government had no choice but to reject it.

Being a Government employee myself, when it comes to tendering you have to apply the same rules to everyone. If the Government had accepted Telstra's tender, even though it did not comply with the requirements in the RFT (and this was well publicised, they would have left themselves open for all sorts of problems, e.g. being sued by other applicants.

Optus was right to say that Telstra's submission was a joke: a 12 page letter to the Minister in lieu of a serious tender for a $4.7bn project is brinkmanship of the worst sort and the Government was right to call their bluff.

As usual headline is totally wrong.

[timmarhy]

No where does it say they are making laws to keep telstra out. they did however reject telstra's non compliant bid, and i didn't suprise me in the slightest they are sick of Trujillo's bullshit. he keeps trying to claim telstra are the only company that can build a national network. seriously who does he think he is fooling. there is a dozen companies in oz that could build a better network than telstra. this along with constant hollow threats of not building the new network, when no one wants them to be involved to begin with are enough to make anyone sick to death of them.

IMHO Trujillo needs to get it through his thick head that 15 billion in tax payers money is going to come with strings attached, like it or not.