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AU National Broadband Network Signs $11 Billion Deal With Telstra
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian government has signed an $11 billion deal with the country's largest telco, Telstra, to acquire the telco's physical infrastructure and migrate customers to the National Broadband Network. The NBN is a 100Mbps open access fiber network that will be rolled out to 94% of the Australian population, with wireless and satellite to cover the remainder. The deal marks a large step forward for the new network, as without a deal to bring Telstra's customers onboard, the NBN's viability was in question."
If this was a country other than Australia I'd think it was awesome. Now this just seems as a way to further invade the internet lives of their citizens. I sure hope people can still buy private internet, but I doubt they'll be able to.
Maybe now the Australian people won't get fucked by Telstra any longer. Seriously, that's got to be one of THE worst ISPs I've seen people use.
I've had more stable video conference calls on a 56k dialup.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Australia is currently spearheading innovation in Western censorship and control. Think of it like MSDN for governments.
4. Profit! (for the Telstra shareholders)
Well it would be about time for them
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This will save the government billions of dollars in trench digging and pole construction. This is a great sign that the NBN won't be scrapped by any upcoming parties.
On the other hand since the NBN is essentially going to either make Telstra's service a niche product or drive the company into bankruptcy, you'd think they'd just nationalize their assets anyways. But at least this way the shareholders, most of which are common Australian families, will get something out of it.
The Telstra-NBN deal illustrates how the telecom industry should be restructured.
In the US, recent policy has moved in exactly the opposite direction, towards more vertical integration, so the telephone companies, who own wires built with monopoly money, don't have to let competing ISPs use them at all. They only have to let competitive phone companies (CLECs) use them under certain circumstances, which are shrinking; this basically is limited to old copper wire in urban areas and town centers.
A "LoopCo" would be a company that owns the outside wire and leases it equally to all comers, building fiber for all who want to rent it, even cable. One fiber plant is a lot easier to afford than two or three. The original NBN plan would have built a new fiber plant to compete with Telstra; as customers moved off of Telstra's old copper network, Telstra would have lost money. Telstra blinked: They're selling their existing plant to NBN, so that they will be the biggest wholesale customer, not a competitor. Telstra wins: They get to use the new network, and get paid A$11B for their old wire. The country wins: They get NBN's new fiber, and don't have to fight Telstra all the way, or pay twice.
The Bells in the US do not see it this way. Nor does the FCC, which is squarely in their pocket. Expect the US to fall farther and farther behind, as the farce called "National Broadband Plan" leads to more of the same, just with higher taxes to subsidize CenturyTel, TDS, and other rural subsidy whores who can use the subsidy money to put local wireless ISPs, who are not eligible for subsidies (only one subsidy recipient in a given place - it's literally a monopoly fund) out of business.
Provision of last-mile services are not commercially viable, virtually every network of this type has been built with government funds.. If such a network comes under private ownership it will always be a monopoly because it isn't commercially viable to build any competing infrastructure.
Such infrastructure should always have remained controlled by a non profit wholesale provider, and let third parties brand and offer services to end users.
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Seems like every day there's a story about AT&T, Verizon, "cable" and "digital switchovers". It's just one country, right?
No new pipes to the US, no competitive data rates, held back adsl 2, count data use up and down ect.
Labor could have done this right with clean new equipment, new telcos and worlds best practice.
Now we have the same old rust belt tech grafted on.
The same crushed ducts, digital loop carrier DLC protecting telco leaders getting rehabilitated with public funding.
The only effort put into national networking was to stifle, silence and suppress any talk of one.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Splitting telstra into retail / wholesale is a good idea.... but we just sold the thing for about $20b, and now we're buying back the wholesale half at the same time we're going to replace the infrastructure anyway?
And why on earth would the viability of the network be in question without telstra's customers? Surely a faster / better built fiber network would have a queue of customers beating down their door?
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.