John Linton ........though it's not yet a 'done deal'.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/telstra-signs-transfer-deal-20100620-yosf.html
As it is one of only two possible outcomes it can't be called a surprise but although Telstra have apparently obtained their $11 billion asking price rather than NBNCo's $8 billion it was hard for me to see how this deal is beneficial to Telstra (the monopolist) at any price. But of course the bare bones announcement of a 'deal' subject to various approvals does not begin to disclose what 'special accommodations' have been arranged that do in fact perpetuate Telstra's infrastructure monopolies. It's also not spelled out what Telstra 'is allowed' to do in terms of offering its own fibre services as it seems the word "copper" was very precisely used in the brief announcement. It's all beyond me to make any further comment.
Exetel will begin offering fibre services in the Opticomm estates and the three Tasmanian 'test towns' by the end of this week (though without me being here that may not happen as scheduled) and our experiences with the fibre trials in Point Cook have been interesting so far. We will learn a lot more over the coming months about infrastructure requirements as the different 'carriers' networks are tested by more and more resellers. It's already apparent that both NBN and Opticomm have a very long way to go to match the sorts of B2B and general support and provisioning facilities we, as a wholesale buyer for several years take for granted from Telstra and neither Opticomm nor NBNCo (nor Telstra) are even contemplating the sort of fault rectification services that Optus provide to its wholesale customers.
Whether the NBNCo survives a change of government, which must now be considered to be more of a possibility than it once was if still unlikely, is still uncertain for all the right reasons (and many wrong reasons) though there is now the fascinating scenario of who would buy the NBNCo assets from the government if a new government decided to scrap the 'NBN2'? How much money would be spent by the time any new government was in a position to make such a decision that might be useful to a prospective buyer of the distressed assets?
http://www.itwire.com/it-policy-news/regulation/39866-coalition-to-halt-nbn-telstra-deal-smith
The other very interesting question raised by the Telstra decision is of course - what will they do with the $A11 billion to be paid in undisclosed chunks over an undisclosed time frame? Telstra has always been flush with unallocated cash (courtesy of its monopoly pricing) so how can it use this 'lump sum' injection most effectively? (assuming it isn't going to return most/all of it to its shareholders). It could use some of it to more rapidly introduce LTE and blast apart the mobile data market. It, assuming the conditions of its pending agreement don't prohibit it, could use it to beef up its already considerable fibre infrastructures. It certainly will 'run down' its future expenditures on the maintenance of the current PSTN freeing up even more money even after the PSTN revenues begin to fall faster.
So, in a way, less is now certain about the future than before this 'decision' was announced in almost every respect to every interested party other than Telstra. Not that it matters that much unless you have a large investment in an obsolete technology as there is unlikely to be any difference in buying services from a privately owned monopoly or revert to a public owned monopoly that was sold off to the privately owed monopoly less than 20 years ago because the publicly owned monopoly was grossly inefficient - irony anyone? Perhaps the NBNCo should be renamed 'Telecom Australia' just to make the point clearer to those people who haven't been around long enough to appreciate the bathos rather than the irony of this announcement?
I leave for the airport in a few hours and will not worry about the future for a few weeks.
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