John Linton .....in it's latest attempt to kill off the 'NBN'?
Maybe it's because I'm in a third world country that this item from today's online SMH made such a telling point:
http://business.smh.com.au/business/transpacific-on-the-nose-with-shareholders-20090216-898s.html
Telstra alternative
Telstra will again be spruiking its plan B today - after it was kicked out of the Rudd Government's tender for a national broadband network two months ago.
The telco is expected to announce in Sydney the roll out over the next two months of what it describes as the "fastest wireless broadband network in the world".
Telstra's alternative strategy has entailed shifting its fixed-line customers on to both its cable infrastructure - which can deliver broadband speeds of up to 30 megabits per second in Sydney and Melbourne - and its wireless NextG network.
Pretty much the Lanka Telecom approach to providing a communications network for Sril Lanka - where you can get up to 40mbps fibre in the two main cities and 14.4 mbps HSPA pretty much everywhere else....and this 'model' is being repeated in more than a dozen poorer or geographically challenged countries around the globe at the moment. It seems the perfect solution to Australia's 'geographical issues' as well as not costing the Australian taxpayers anything - of course my views are biased as I have been saying this since those loonies in the ACT attempted to deliver on their election winning sound bite policy which they have been unable to back away from.
It will be interesting to see what happens now with Telstra clearly signalling that if the government goes ahead and tries to build a rival network to Telstra's current monopoly it will have do its costings based on having no current Telstra customers which, of course, are the majority of all Australian customers particularly in rural and regional areas. On the face of it a nice 'come back' and it may even work as Krudd and Stupid Stephen are so pig ignorant and bereft of communications knowledge (and presumably knowedgable advisors based on the fact that those advisors appear to be incapable of preventing Krudd and SS from making their ridiculous statements).
The big problem with this Telstra 'strategy' (which even they must soon admit is simply an 'NBN' "spoiler") is that to price their fast fibre and HSPA data services at points that will compete with some sort of eventual NBN would be almost impossible for them to prevent their customers making their own decisions to move to an alternative. If in fact Telstra did decide to offer fibre and HSPA at prices that woud compete with an 'NBN' then they will succeed in protecting their monopoly while sending Optus down a doomed infrastructure investment path that will cripple it forever and also giving themselves five more years of not having to provide data services at sensible prices.
So Krudd and SS have yet another problem, albeit a bluff, to deal with in costing just how much a NBN will really cost and how much they will have to kick in of taxpayer's money just to get the process started. As they have proved themselves completely incapable of grasping the requirements ofany aspect of government to date there is little reason to expect a sensible decison on the 'NBN' which, the way its going is going to ensure that Telstra's monopoly is enshrined for at least the rest of my life time. This brief article proides why Telstra's B Plan won't work:
http://www.cablefax.com/technology/news/Study-FTTH-Revenue-Tops-DSL_34080.html
Nil Desperandum - hopefully this bunch of doctrinaire, lunatic incompetents will continue digging their own grave and despite their growing in frequency choruses of "it's not our fault it's the GFC" this three years of the worst federal government mismanagment since Whitlam destroyed Australia's economy for twenty years will be over in 18 months time and the new coalition government can put a stop to the whole fiasco and subsidise the three mobile carrier's LTE networks in rural and regional areas and consign Telstra's monopoly to an end in that sensible way.
Perhaps that's too much to hope for?