John Linton .....into wholesale and retail.....does anyone really care any more other than the duplicitous federal government?
I read the DBDCE announcements from Stupid Stephen yesterday and thought how naively ignorant that man and the advisers in the DBCDE must be to have spent so much time and tax payer money coming up with such a stable door closing 'initiative'. Is splitting Telstra Wholesale away from Telstra Retail some time in the future going to make the slightest bit of difference to any end user in the near future? I can't see any reason why that would be the case and certainly no reason is found in yesterday's documentation. When the two major political parties that were originally planning to privatise the then Telecom Australia both sides of politics were given advice by the 'independent advisers' they each appointed to advise them that an absolute condition of such a privatisation must include the separation of Telecom Australia into separate Retail and Wholesale components that were completely separate corporate entities. Both governments of the day ignored that 'advice' and the results over the past twenty years are self evident - no competition within the Australian communications industry ever developed.
So the 'mug punters' (who produced the current illegitimate government) will wisely nod their brainless heads and mumble things like "better late than never" and other meaningless and thought bereft phrases that is their only contribution to what they believe to be interlocution. Is it better late than never? Of course not - and it certainly is not on Stupid Stephen's agenda as a means of increasing competition in Australia - it is, quite obviously, quite the reverse - it is intended to lessen competition for the cobbled together future 'NBN2'. Get it? The proposition is that if 'Telstra Retail' still controlled Telstra Wholesale in the many ways it does today then Telstra would continue to control the total Australian communications the way it does today. Stupid Stephen naively believes (or people who advise him believe because Stupid Stephen knows as much about Australian telecommunications as I do about nuclear physics) that splitting Telstra will somehow weaken Telstra's domination of the communications markets....because he is so stupid. A five year old child couldn't be persuaded that could ever be the case....it's 20 years too late and currnet conditions make it meaningless.
But what will actually happen in a Testra separated Australia? Will Telstra Wholesale buy services from Telstra Retail at better pricing than today? Will Telstra Wholesale flee to the 'NBN2' to buy better than than Telstra Retail can for fibre services? Why will any current wholesale buyer continue to buy from Telstra Wholesale if there ever was a viable alternative? The answers to all of those questions is "no". So what will actually change? The answer to that is "nothing". What SS HOPES will happen is that Telstra, as it exists today, will become less able to provide alternatives to the 'NBN2' which even his department believes is financially unviable and without a significantly weakened Telstra will not ever become viable at all. Why is this? Well...where do you start. Read your choice of non government analasys of why the 'NBN2' won't ever generate enough profit to pay for itself.
A separated Telstra Wholesale has no commercially logical reason to exist - all it MUST do is to add even more cost to the Telstra services it currently and plans to provide. By the current definition it cannot buy from the 'NBN2' than a company of Exetel's size can so it can't 'wholesale' 'NBN2' services in any real way (forget the value add scenarios which all must be sourced from Telstra Retail in the short term future). So what does a separated "Telstra Wholesale" become? It becomes a less attractive provider to its current wholesale customers and it will struggle to add any value to the 'NBN2' services if and when they become available. So SS is expecting that the current wholesale customers, such as they are, will stop buying Telstra based products entirely and that a "Telstra Wholesale" will cease to exist shortly after it is legislated in to existence. That's the two minute version but, I am pretty sure, when any sensible person thinks through any realistic set of scenarios, they will reach the same conclusion.
A 'break up of Telstra' is not designed to increase competition in the Australian communications marketplaces - it is, almost certainly, just a politically driven stunt to decrease competition to the 'NBN2'....and it won't be the last 'initiative' with that objective.
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