John Linton ...as their 'bluff' failed and they are excluded from the NBN RFP. (or perhaps they succeeded brilliantly in the latest move in the 'chess game').
Telstra had already appeared to have accepted that their bluff was failing and had moved to the Plan B as I posited here last Tuesday:
NBN "Already Not Necessary For Rural Australia" According To Telstra...
I doubt that I was the only one who had 'heard the whispers' out of Canberra that the two favoured bids were from Axia and Optus (though at a meeting with Optus I had last Wednesday they didn't seem to know) and that Telstra's bluff and bluster had gone too far for Krudd to 'stomach' in challenging his view that, irrespective of his total lack of knowledge on any subject, ONLY he knows what is the right thing to do.
So - Telstra had already started to 'prove' that HSPA will deliver better than NBN to rural Australia before today's announcement and that their 900 plus ADSL2 exchanges are sufficient for the rest and, "hey - see you in court if you want any access to our pits and channels" will ensure that any time frame for any selected company building a fibre network will take a very, very long time.
So a combination of HSPA in the country and roping in as many 'independent ISPS' as possible onto its ADSL2 network plus using the courts to delay any build as much as possible is the go - "An NBN is unnecessary" phase will now be entered plus a challenge to Telstra's exclusion in whatever court Telstra selects.
So as I, and many other people said, some twelve months ago the NBN will continue to go nowhere fast while Telstra uses its dominance to make as much money as it can as quickly as it can - in its shareholder's interests of course. Nothing's changed so "nothing to see here - move along". It's also obvious that Telstra's lawyers probably played a major part in developing the strategy of submitting a 'bid' that was effectively an 'invitation to reject' and has based a subsequent strategy on the rejection of the bid. It should be equally obvious that the Federal AG and the Federal SG advised on the wording of the rejection in that knowledge.
It will be interesting to see how far Telstra's shares fall today?
The good thing, at least from Exetel's point of view is that Telstra will now increase its efforts to demonstrate that HSPA is the ONLY viable way of providing broadband to rural Australia and to many parts of 'country' Australia and will accelerate (if that isn't already the case) their ability to deliver 21 mbps+ services over HSPA which will push Optus and Vodafone to do the same. The more 'solid' HSPA becomes in delivering broadband to rural Australia the less 'need' there will be for running fibre to those areas - mind you - I made that point over a year ago and I wasn't the only one.
If Exetel can't get the right 'deal' from Optus on HSPA over the coming months then we will have to consider just how we can base a future residential business on HSPA. If that proves not to be possible in Australia with our obviously currently small volumes then we will have to consider how we could use a UK HSPA operation to overcome that disadvantage.
In the mean time we will try and get our 'rural' HSPA solution to 'market' in late January and will continue to push for better pricing that will allow for a greater, and faster, market place coverage.It seems to me, and it has for almost ten years, that there will almost never be a time that fibre to remote areas of Australia will ever be economical and that wireless was the only way to go (because the physics of satellite could never be overcome) - maybe this decade it will happen?
So, on balance, Telstra's possible mis-reading of their position vis-a-vis the past and current government's 'flexibility' towards their black mail and just plain arrogant disregard for the real issues involved in providing 21st century communications in Australia in the realistic future simply, once again, underlines the MAJOR PROBLEM THAT JUST ISN'T GOING TO GO AWAY - which is of course - using hindsight - the decision to privatise Telstra in the current way it's been done will ensure that all Australians will never get the communications network that is needed. The way it stands at the moment is that a commercial company, in the interests of several hundred thousand shareholders (probably more correctly a handful of short term visiting opportunity seekers and their Australian sycophants) constantly wages war on 20 million other Australians pushing the cost of sub-standard communications to the highest possible levels.
It is simply is, and always has been, an untenable situation.
Scipio the elder put it succinctly some 2,200 years go when pointing out (about a similarly ongoing intransigent problem) that, no matter how anyone tried to twist and turn, there was only one solution.
Telstra Delenda Est