John Linton
........make up its mind about what the position of control of the Australian communications industry should look like sometime soon.
Not a lot of issues seem to disturb the communications business in Australia. This is mainly because for virtually the whole of our existence telecommunications has been either 100% controlled by a government monopoly or 95% controlled by a recently ex-government monopoly in the hands of private carpet bagging financial rapers and looters. So the seasons come and the seasons go and nothing changes in terms of new services or new initiatives or more realistic pricing and absolutely nothing changes in terms of being able to do anything new with communications other than glacially slowly.
Over breakfast yesterday (I got up very late) I watched the ABC Insiders program which is briefly and badly summarised here:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/05/2617119.htm?section=business
though the full video is now available and will fill in the many of the gaps in the article.
It really doesn't matter that the individual concerned hasn't got a clue about the topic he raises it is sufficient that the topic is raised at all in this continuation of the era of political crucifixion of the Australian communications infrastructure. It doesn't matter one iota what densely populated countries like Japan or Korea do and it is even less relevant what a city/state like Singapore, which has a land mass smaller than Wollongong, does. In case it escapes anyone who watches the video let me underline for you that the issue is not what they may or may not achieve in terms of FTTH but the fact that in those countries it is GOVERNMENTS that make it happen. Perhaps they do it inefficiently and slowly but they actually do do it and they do it in the context of the well being of all of their people and against a long term and relatively thought out scenario that DOESN'T rely on a rip off financial return for the few drones paid for by the many.
Communications is, at least in the 21st century, not something that can be developed by "private enterprise" in countries like Japan, Korea, Singapore or even the countries of the EU. For a country the size and population distribution to begin to go down that road is just plain stupid - witness the raping and looting of Australian residential and business communications users by Telstra for the past ten years if you believe otherwise. A 'private' communications infrastructure makes as much sense as a 'private' police force or a 'private' road system.
OK, the nonsense announcement by Krudd (to cover up his previous election promise nonsense of building an NBN for $A5 billion) that Labor will now spend tens of billions trying to build an NBN2 is simply that - the barefaced lying stupidity of a bare faced lying opportunist who has very little knowledge of constructing anything more complicated than an IKEA 'entertainment centre' and the thought of them trying to plan an NBN2 is just plain risible. But the thought of leaving the future development of Australia's nation wide communications network to Telstra, or any other 'private enterprise' structure, is just simply insane.
If anything is 'proven' by the various government or non-government communications infrastructure builds around the developed world over the past two decades it is that only a government has succeeded in providing a real infrastructure and the methodology to allow services to be delivered over it in a way that is vaguely beneficial and at a reasonable cost to the residential and business end user. This also demonstrates why the most efficient and competitive private enterprise communications systems in the world (those in the USA) aren't within light years of the government 'mandated' networks in other countries in terms of either function or cost effectiveness.
Now I have absolutely NO doubt that a Labor, or a Coalition, government in Australia will screw up the building of anything as complicated as an Australia wide network (the overt pork barreling of their recently announced 'initiatives' is so sadly predictable it's almost ludicrous and confirms that anyone's worst fears of a 'government' directed network will be far from perfect and will cost far more than it should) but the alternative simply isn't worth considering for a nanosecond.
So the message, in the event that there is one, from the "national communications infrastructures" being built by Japan, Korea, Singapore et alia is that they will be built at decent technological levels and will be built to serve the overwhelming majority of those countries citizens and that multiple retail vendors will provide some reasonable level of competition thus ensuring new services will continually to be introduced as quickly as possible and also prices will, by definition, remain as low as real competition always brings.
How any country 'constructs' the retail sellers of the government owned infrastructure will vary by country and will undoubtedly in Australia almost certainly (but not absolutely certainly) include Telstra. There is a lot to be said for Telstra being precluded from accessing the new (incredibly expensive) NBN2 that may eventually be built by Krudd or his successor(s). Personally I doubt that any NBN will deliver services for the best part of a decade and over that time I would prefer to see the rapacious Telstra do everything in its power to actually deliver cost effective services over its current networks partly to ensure that Krudd's desires to keep winning elections using the billions of pork barrel funds is at least somewhat limited by some sort of eventual cost analysis benchmark.
Even if Telstra becomes a reseller of the proposed NBN2 it's very difficult to see how they would take it seriously given that they would still have the old monopoly on a perfectly usable national infrastructure that long before the NBN2 could be built it could upgrade and reduce the costs on to a point that an end user would think twice before moving to the Krudd memorial. Having said that the privatised Telstra has, at least to date, never shown the slightest inkling of an intention to deliver any service at a realistic price to the end user so to expect them to do so now may well be pie in the sky.
....come to think of it.....and considering that Telstra and Krudd are the main people involved - the whole scenario becomes so surreal it is never going to happen - at least not in my life time.
PS: Someone tell Whine that the "inflation genie" found its way back to the bottle some time ago - actually it never "escaped".