John Linton ....it isn't "really good to be home".....and I doubt that anyone ever feels that way after a really good holiday.
We had an uneventful trip home with a bonus of arriving at 6.30pm instead of 6.30 am which meant that no other flights arrived at the same time and immigration and customers were deserted and the lazy and totally inefficient baggage transfer crews had no other aircraft to deal with and our bags arrived almost immediately...so within 'minutes' we were heading home in only slightly congested Southern Cross Drive traffic. A novel experience from the 6.30 am Sydney airport nightmares. So - back to work after an only mildly jet lag disrupted night.I wondered what this might eventually turn out to mean:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/telstra-confirms-it-will-wholesale-3g-339322793.htm
or more correctly what Telstra "wholesale" would now begin to do in a possible separated world. What possible reason for being will Telstra "wholesale" have in the event that there is some sort of 'NBN2' after the next Federal election? Will anyone be buying "wholesale" services from Telstra for any meaningful length of time beyond a coalition win at the next election - irrespective of what that results in? From one point of view any 'good' that has come from the de-regulation of the telecommunications market since 1992 has been removed in the current federal governments unseemly, and uneducated, haste to render any bite the ACCC might have once had useless and a 'freed' Telstra has already returned to the 'old ways' of eliminating any competition where it has any ability at all to do so.
That is not a particularly bad thing as over the past two years this has had to be achieved via price cutting to end users while it attempts to re-monopolise those parts of the residential markets it had, temporarily, lost its grip on. But having badly damaged its ADSL competitors it will not have such constraints in the future and it will simply return to shutting off access to competitors that wish to use it's structures - and, as an unreserved 'free trader' I see nothing wrong with that. So I found the cited article interesting if only for its naivete and stupidity. Does anone seriously think that Telstra will provide "real wholesale" pricing for 4G mobile any more than it provides "real wholesale" pricing for any other product? If you do then perhaps you need to change your medication for something less mind transforming.
Mind you if you swallow the "it will take six months" to do something that requires no thought at all beyond whatever "thinking" has been done to make the decision not to "wholesale" the service for the past (pick your time frame) then perhaps lowering your meds won't help. If I was a conspiracy theorist, which I'm not by any definition of that term, I would say that the only reason that Telstra would wholesale a high speed mobile service should be taken in the context of the strange clause in the "break up agreement" that forbids Telstra from "advertising its high speed mobile service in competition with the 'NBN2'. Does that make me sound like a conspiracy theorist when all I am attempting to do is to say that a "wholesaled" Telstra high speed mobile service will be as effective in generating competition as a currently "wholesaled" Telstra ADSL2 or PSTN service....totally ineffective.
Perhaps I am completely wrong, again, but then I haven't had to think about such nonsenses for three weeks and to begin to read the Australian communications media again after such a long absence does come as a depressing 'shock'....plus ca change........
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