John Linton ......capital city of a third world country with a 25 year old civil war continuing to rage.....
....I am writing this blog on a 14.4 mbps HSPA connection that costs me less than Exetel's Australian offerings and, as always, being away from the immediacy of the second by second operation of a demanding business your thought patterns and perspectives begin to change.
I was interested to read this:
http://business.smh.com.au/business/aapt-tieup-looms-20090213-873b.html
having read something very similar while I was in Auckland in early January. As a customer of both AAPT (via the Powertel takeover) and Vodafone, Exetel would really like to see this happen as I imagine would AAPT's residential customers. The brief article alludes to the obvious operational benefits that could be derived from such a merger/takeover eventually but it would make more competitive sense to have three largish carriers covering the full range of data and telephony services although, as always, there is some risk of just using the Telstra umbrella pricing concept to actually reduce competition and competitive pricing.
Not that anything is going to change in a hurry even if such a merger did go ahead with the need to first merge the '3' and Vodafone mobile networks and then the further need to do the same with AAPT's separate fibre and other back haul networks. At least AAPT doesn't lose money so there wouldn't be the need to 'slash and burn' to the same extent that there will probably be in integrating the '3' operations......not that I'd know.
One of the things that I've always liked about technology is the fact that it acts like the old socalist concepts of death duties in the late 19th/early 20th centuries - in their case it was to break up the hereditary power of the landed gentry by forcing them to break up their estates which, over three generations pretty much accomplished that. In technology's case it does some thing similar with incumbent monopolies by rendering the basis of their monopolies obsolescent (earned in the case of a company like IBM or Microsoft) or unearned in the case of a 'company' like Telstra.
In Telstra's case they have pursued the 'triple play' concept of using the base carrier platform of owning the Australian wireline network to play ducks and drakes with the pricing of that network to accrue the additional revenues of telephone, data and entertainment revenues to themselves. That made logical sense as long as their telephone network remained essential to the delivery of telephone calls, data transmission and entertainment.
Mobile telephony, VoIP and now HSPA have all radically changed that mix and not only that have begun to render the deployment of the wire lines owned by Telstra less important but there is some real sign that the monopoly is moving towards the true end of their useful life. Obviously it won't happen tomorrow but irrespective of whether or not there is some attempt to build an "NBN" there is a true likelihod that Telstra will join the dinosaurs of commercial (and I use the word loosely) enterprise before the end of the next decade - they will no longer exist not only as a monopoly but their ludicrously high pricing and their predatory methods of operation will have, by their own actions, driven them to the extinction those actions always produce in the end.
Maybe I'm totally wrong but, it does seem to me, that technology's inexorable progress is opening up more than a few cracks in the impermeable dam that Telstra has placed as a barrier to technology progress in communications in Australia and those trickles down the giant wall of sloth and avarice (sorry for the mixed meaphors) have every indication of becoming stronger and the cracks larger.
Wishful thinking? Probably - but the sun is beginning to rise over the, non-metaphorical ocean I can see above my lap top's screen and I'm about to start a work day in a country where there is no Telstra and Exetel isn't regarded as a parasite but as a welcome contributor to the country's economy.
It gives you a very different view of yourself, your company and what you can do with your working day.
For the benefit of all Australians and the end to 100 years of carpet bagging - Telstra Delenda Est (apologies to Scipio the Elder)