Telco CEO Asks For "Baby Bell Solution" For Australia

natecochrane writes "The CEO of Australia's No.2 telco, Optus, has called for a "Baby Bell" solution to handle what he says is a growing threat to competition in the emerging $43 billion Australian national fibre-broadband network. Paul O'Sullivan says that only by breaking up the network architect NBN Co and tendering out its services, overseen by an independent board (much like Australia's Reserve Bank the Fed), can competition be preserved. And he had a few choice words to say about Australia's 'No.2' ISP, iiNet: 'If you take into account we operate a cable network and not ADSL [primarily] we're still significantly larger than iiNet.'"

Comments

Oh pretty please Mr Government

[mjwx]

Do something about my competition, I dont want to compete, it's too hard.

The problem Optus has here is that it loses a valuable position as part of a copper monopoly. Optus and Telstra own pretty much all the copper in Oz (telephone and cable) and charge other ISP's, such as iinet a fortune to use it. Not to mention the DSLAM's they rent out to other ISP's. Once the NBN is completed Optus and Telstra have to compete on equal terms with competitive ISP's like iinet and Internode. NBNco leases the NBN fibre to any company that will pay the fee to lease the line, this includes Optus.

'If you take into account we operate a cable network

That can reach about 5% of Aussie homes, let me know when you were planning to cable up Vic Park, I'll be getting NBN by the end of the year. Given the reach of Optus's cable network, iinet is still number 2.

Bunch of self serving, conniving wankers. You've let the broadband situation get this bad in the first place, 15 years of doing next to nothing, you wouldn't even roll out ADSL2 until iinet gave you a swift kick in the arse. Well we're all sick of it and now the Government is doing what you refused to and you're having a big bloody cry over it.

Harden the fuck up Paul O'Sullivan.

Re:Oh pretty please Mr Government

[mjwx]

Optus don't own any POTS copper, telstra own 100% of that.

POTS which was laid by Telecom Australia, not Telstra.

For those of us that have just tuned in, Telstra is the privatised remnants of our public telecom, Telecom Australia which laid the copper around Oz. Telstra have been neglecting that infrastructure for the last 15 odd years.

They own a HFC cable network that was overbuilt by telstra's own HFC cable in almost every place they rolled it out

Which they are under no obligation to permit other ISP's access to, hence part of the copper monopoly. They also tried some backroom deals with Foxtel combining Optus Cable and Foxtel Pay TV services to try and better Telstra, Foxtel uptake simply suffered as a result.

HFC is also no real competitor to Fibre, it's a shared bus with a maximum speed of 100 Mb\s deployed in selected area's of 2 Australian cities (out of 18 locations with a population exceeding 100,000) where as the glass NBNco is installing will not top out at 1 Gb\s although 100 Mb\s is the best NBNco will be offering at the outset, will be available to 93% of Australian homes (fixed wireless and satellite will comprise the rest) and each link is a dedicated connection to the backbone.

Re:Oh pretty please Mr Government

[mjwx]

How so? If I have the slightest problem with my phone line I call Telstra, and within days they have a tech onsite repairing or replacing whatever length of cable required, and if it's outside my property at no cost to me. How are they neglecting it in

Except when you're with iinet, it takes 2 and a half months (11 weeks) to get a fault even looked at.

Telstra double-billed my former workplace (a business customer) in 5 out of every six bills. The day after I announced we'd completed our transition away from Telstra (to Amcom), I arrived at my desk to find a carton of Little Creatures Pils and a very nice thank you note from the accountant and bookkeeper.

Shared 100Mb/s bus? Where did you pull that figure from?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fibre-coaxial

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_Internet_access

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia#Residential_Internet_Access

100 Mbit is the fastest offered by Telstra which was only made available in Melbourne only in 2009. Most of Telstra's and Optus's cable is only 30 Mb\s

Optus and Telstra Cable are available Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and only Telstra in Adelaide and Perth.

Citation.

Also which suburbs. I've lived al over Perth and not had a single cable connection. It's all been DSL because the only copper in the ground is POTS. You'll quickly find that they rolled cable out to very, very limited area's and only to tick a box that says it's in every capital city.

No. You WILL be sharing with either 32 or 64 users back to a node that runs to the backbone

Uhh...

What have you been smoking.

You'll be connected by point to point fibre back to the exchange, basically identical to POTS. There you'll be multiplexed onto the backbone (via a GPON rather then a DSLAM). In fact, they'll be using the exact same pits and ducts for the glass as is currently being used for the copper. It will be no different then the current topology.

Can you imagine the cost or even the size of the cable to run each individual house back in spread out suburbs like here in Melbourne

It will look exactly the same as the current POTS system which is also point to point from the exchange (backbone) to the node (your house). This is the kind of FUD that I'm getting tired of disproving. Please do some research before spouting off again, you can start with the links I've provided.

Re:Oh pretty please Mr Government

[Sabriel]

How so? If I have the slightest problem with my phone line I call Telstra, and within days they have a tech onsite repairing or replacing whatever length of cable required, and if it's outside my property at no cost to me. How are they neglecting it in anyway?

Must be nice to live in a capital city. The pit near my neighbour's house was left in disrepair for several years - they started joking that they'd have to hold birthday parties for it.

Telstra deliberately neglected the infrastructure as much as they could. And why not? That's standard operating procedure for any corporation lacking a strong moral or visionary centre, because without that the tendency is to a destructive feedback loop for short-term profit. The only counters are usually fresh executive blood or some form of external threat - and Telstra has acquired both, the latter especially in spades. Interesting times.

Re:Oh pretty please Mr Government

[Ronin441]

It's amazing, for a company only created in the 1990's, how quickly Optus turned into a clumsy inefficient monopolist. (Well, duopolist, really.) You'd think they'd have designed new systems from the ground up, but you can sure feel their back end creaking like it's written in COBOL. Telstra were (and are) so big and slow and expensive that you'd think a new player would run rings around them. But they didn't.

Bring on the day when the phone network is obsolete, and all phone companies can do is sell data connections.

Re:Oh pretty please Mr Government

[AK Marc]

How so?

They are the monopoly. The copper in the ground has a time associated with it, usually 20 years in the US, but sometimes 30 years. This is the usable life, and it's scheduled to come out of the ground essentially on the day it goes in. However, like in the US, the monopoly just says "meh, no one knows or cares that we are using mostly 50 year old copper in almost all places where copper was laid that long ago" and continues to use it. In the US, they essentially made the promise to replace the copper with fibre after 20 years, then didn't. That lack of action is the neglect.

If I have the slightest problem with my phone line I call Telstra, and within days they have a tech onsite repairing or replacing whatever length of cable required, and if it's outside my property at no cost to me. How are they neglecting it in anyway?

If they had replaced it on schedule, then you'd likely not be having the problems you are calling them for, and you'd likely have fibre to your door already. Just because it's working and they respond quickly to faults doesn't mean they aren't neglecting the basic infrastructure. You know, the massive network of copper in the ground that they probably paid $0.10 for every $1 spent to put it there when they bought the company on the promise to keep it up at market rates, which they then simply didn't do.

No. You WILL be sharing with either 32 or 64 users back to a node that runs to the backbone.

All Internet is "shared" at some point. With DSL, you have a dedicated line to the DSLAM. With ADSL2+, they are moving to outdoor DSLAMs in neighborhood cabinets for shortest copper length. If they have the DSLAM at the CO, then yes, it will be dedicated copper lines back to the CO backbone. And if not, they have, in practice, more bandwidth between the cabinet and the CO than the sum of the lines from the homes to the cabinet. Why? Because if they have copper to the CO, then they'd often have worse bandwidth to the CO than a single person's DSL line. So it's almost always fiber. Since it's almost always fiber, they've laid a line capable of many multiples of the total copper bandwidth. They might cheap-out on the optics, but the line is greater than the sum of the inputs. Also, the links back are as "private" as anything on the Internet.

With cable, you do get more than the 100 Mbps the GP was talking about, but you are on a bus with others. That means that with a DOCSIS modem of your own you can flash and such, you can set up to listen to all your neighbor's traffic. It's generally not done in practice, but it still is done some and is possible on almost all cable networks. And that's impossible with DSL.

Re:Oh pretty please Mr Government

[daver00]

How so? If I have the slightest problem with my phone line I call Telstra, and within days they have a tech onsite repairing or replacing whatever length of cable required

All they have to do when they rush out to help you is make a "temporary repair", this is little more than twisting some new copper together and wrapping it up in electrical tape. The repair is then flagged "temporary" and goes into a list of temporary repairs which all need to be fixed within a certain time. Except that they almost always screw up again before they are fixed properly and the whole cycle repeats itself.

Add to that most Telstra pits (the things with cement or plastic lids which give cable access) have broken lids, or broken drainage. If a pit lid is broken it is meant to be flagged and replaced, except that they never are, and consequently half the pits in the nation fill up with water and hence phone lines go bad whenever it rains: enter the temporary repair jobs mentioned previously. Add to this the fact that much of the copper installed is original cabling and never had proper insulation to begin with, this is mostly the case on the fringes of the network though.

I'm no fan of a new government monopoly, but we desperately NEED an infrastructure upgrade like the NBN. Telstra (and its competitors) have had the opportunity to prove to us that the private sector can handle such a vast network spread over such a thin populace, and they have shown that they will do as little as possible. The NBN also means structural separation of Telstra, which is something that should have been implemented from the outset.

Funny economy politics

[Errol backfiring]

Well, it is kinda odd. Politicians want companies to compete to win, but they do not want any company to win.

Re:The Fed?

[Cimexus]

The Australian Reserve Bank is pretty good actually. Keep in mind Australia was the only OECD country not to go into recession during the global financial crisis. A big part of that admittedly was the fact that we didn't lend money to people that couldn't possibly repay it, and the Govt. was running a modest surplus rather than the massive deficit present in many other countries. However, the Reserve Bank also has a part to play in managing the economy and has, on balance, done a pretty good job of it over the last decade or two.