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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."
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.
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.
The Australian Senate is the house of review - the upper house. It is the House of Representatives that is the lower house, and that introduces legislation. The legislation passed the House of Representatives; it passed with amendments in the Senate; and now the House of Representatives needs to vote on those amendments (it looks likely that they will pass). Only once all of this is done will the legislation be done and dusted.
In one sense, this could end up being a case of "out of the frying pan, into the fire", since the NBN will be a telecommunications wholesale monopoly provider - nobody's going to be in a position to compete against them on anything more than a very small scale, and in this game, if you're talking small scale, you're talking high costs. That's not necessarily an issue, though, since telecommunications is a natural monopoly. With the appropriate checks on NBNco's hold on telecommunications, it will be a net positive - certainly compared to Telstra (which had the infrastructure monopoly, plus a retail arm that took full advantage of that power - witness all the wrangling that ensued every few years when Bigpond dropped their prices to below what other ISPs could manage on reselling Telstra's wholesale service) it will be a huge win for Australia.
Hopefully the proposed privatisation of NBNco won't go ahead; I see too much value to Australia in keeping it as a government-owned corporation compared with selling it off a few years after the rollout is complete.
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.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I do have a problem with us subsidizing their life choices by living remote from services offered in heavily populated cities. Hell, I'd love to move out to the countryside, and have all the services offered in a city location.
What "choice"? I live in the Australian countryside. I'd love to live in Sydney, but my house is worth about $350,000 dollars, whereas the smallest apartment in Sydney is well out of our league at more than double that, and it wouldn't be big enough to house my family.
I run my own software business from home, and this is possible because I have some form of broadband connection. It's not great - just ADSL (1) and we're so far from the exchange that the speed is well down on the maximum theoretical available. We also have no choice but to use Telstra here, there is no alternative service for this region.
By living here we suffer in terms of not having lots of services available on our doorstep - if it's not agricultural, you can't get it here. So anything "unusual" requires a trip to Sydney or Brisbane which is a 7 hour drive either way, one way. Even basic stuff like home furnishing can be a challenge.
Yes, it's nice to live here, it has many upsides, but it certainly is not convenient compared to living in the city. Roll on the NBN, it will give us many of the benefits that city folk take for granted, and will allow me personally to expand my software enterprise as well as reduce our environmental impact by eliminating many car journeys that are currently forced on us.
AC has never lived in rural Australia.
We are a big country, I mean big, you may think its a long way down to the chemist but thats peanuts on the distances in Australia. We are fucking huge.
I used to live in a mining town in North West Western Australia. If you wanted to get to the beach that's a 5 hour drive laddie at 120 KM/h. If you wanted to go to target, 7 hours drive to Karratha mate. If you wanted to get to Perth, the capital of Western Australia that was a solid 15 hours of driving in a land that is regularly above 35 Degrees C and very sparcely populated.
When I went up through South Thailand by road I was surprised as hell to see signs of civilisation everywhere, farms, houses, villages. You couldn't go a single kilometre without seeing something. In Australia it's not only possible but quite easy to drive for six hours at 100 KM/h and not see another soul. When I went to school, I travelled 85 KM both ways in the blistering heat, luxury I tell you, luxury.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
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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.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.