Australian Telstra Monopoly Dead

philmarcracken writes "The Senate recently passed a bill through the Lower House for the separation of Telstra's retail and wholesale arms and now that same bill has just scraped by in the Upper House; 30 to 28. The deal is worth $11 billion AUD for Telstra and is welcomed by them despite Coalition opposition. This paves the way for the governmental body NBNco to use Telstra's existing assets and expedite laying fibre optic cables to the larger population densities."

Comments

If Telstra is for it, you can bet it's no good

[BadAnalogyGuy]

If a monopoly is happy to go along with a government decision to break it up, you can bet that there's some massive upside for the company. That doesn't necessarily mean better anything for the customer.

About time!

[WillKemp]

Not a moment too soon! Telstra should have been split up when it was privatised. Their constant anti-competitive antics have held Australian telecoms back ever since.

Mod parent up.

[mjwx]

They've got no choice. They fought it as long and hard as they could. The only options for them now are the easy way or the hard way - and they're welcoming the easy way.

The fact that this was not done years ago (heavy Kevvy was talking about it since he was elected) was the fact that Telstra fought it tooth and nail. But it's done now and there is nothing more Telstra can do about it.

Realistically this is something the Howard government should have done when Telstra was privatised in the 90's.

Re:NBN waste of money

[Barny]

Sir, you get:

+2 internets for reference to the late Douglas Adams
+1 internets for reference to monty python
+3 real life merit points for telling it how it fucking is

Good job.

Yes, futureproof...

[Namarrgon]

Important point: It's not an infrastructure loss, it's an infrastructure upgrade, and no copper will be ripped up until all the fibre is in place.

Leaving in the copper for duplication was certainly considered, but the significant advantages caused by a relatively fast national switchover to high-speed fibre won the day (100% uptake = lower prices for all + much wider market for high-speed data services like IPTV, electronic health record transmission, next-gen internet applications etc).

Turnbull does have a few clues about this (that's why he has shares in Melbourne IT; he can see where this is going), and I don't think for a minute that he personally believes Abbott's plan of a little wireless bandaid around the edges is anything more than a stopgap response (it's hardly futureproof in any sense). However, since Abbott booted him from the top spot (shame that) he doesn't have much say in the matter anymore, and now has to toe the party line and just do his assigned job of "demolishing" the Government wherever he can.

Oh, and fibre on the poles? It's going alongside the copper, through Telstra's conduits, ducts, poles; wherever the copper goes - that was one of the main points of the deal with Telstra after all.

Re:NBN waste of money

[mjwx]

In situations like that it sort of makes me wonder who owns all the land. In America you would be passing by people selling trinkets, roadside diners, etc. at least once every 1-2 hours.

What's to own? Road traffic is mainly road trains so why bother. Population density is 0.0001 in most of WA. As the poster above you pointed out, there are 2.3 million people in WA and 1.6 million live in a 80 KM radius of one place (land mass of Western Australia is 2,645,615 KM2).

Land that is away from Perth is essentially worthless unless you have it under good authority that there is something worth mining under it.