John Linton
One of the nice things about this time of year is that you can look back over the previous, almost, 12 months with, hopefully, some degree of satisfaction in what you've achieved personally and what, working with others, you've helped to achieve. If you're involved in running your own small business one of the great satisfactions is always to have successfully negotiated the various possible and actual disasters encountered throughout the year and to have limited the number of really bad decisions you've inflicted on yourself and others to a survivable amount.
As it's been a 'good' year for me and for Exetel in most respects I'm looking forward to putting the final touches on the CY08 operating plan over the next two weeks with a little more optimism than I felt at this time last year - except - I still don't have a clue as to what's going to happen to the current copper structures. Perhaps because I'm a masochist at heart I re-read some of the prognostications and discussions and 'white papers' that pertained to the eventual sale of the Federal Government's stakes in Telstra and the devastation that has caused over the past 15 years immediately prior and subsequent to "T1".
Probably any sensible person reading this will not have ever bothered to read through the pros and cons and wild assumptions that preceded the eventual decision to sell off all of Telstra and few people would remember the instigators of the actual sale mechanics and the nay-sayers who took all the other positions. (John Hewson?). Quite rightly so - what a totally stupid decision making process and what a dogs breakfast of a cobbled together final result and its inevitable consequences it turned out to be.
I can understand the constraints that were imposed on the sale process and the reasoning behind the decisions of the time:
1) Not allowing 'foreign ownership' restricted the value of the business
2) The inability of the Australian equity market to fund a full sale
3) The need to keep arms lengths government controls of a public company
4) A hostile Senate
5) A less than committed coalition partner
and so many others that required compromise after compromise (Thank God for the Democrats eh? - Meg Lees where are you now?)
I doubt anyone would be as stupid as I am to bother to read through the thoughts and public statements of the people involved at the various times (and I only did so to get an idea of where the people currently likely to be influential in making the new decisions on Telstra stood then and where they might now be going - and none of them are still around in positions of influence or decision making).
For anyone who actually would like a relatively unbiased synopsis of how we have reached the current sorry mess this report, written in 2003, gives some realistic facts:
http://wopared.parl.net/library/pubs/chron/2003-04/04chr03.htm
Now that there is a Labour government which, irrespective of its ulltimate longevity, will certainly have to make a decision (after all it was a major election promise) on how it will implement its decision to fund a new fibre network with at least $A4.7 billion of tax payer's money by the end of 2008. It will also have to decide on whether it will also, as it has so often claimed over the past 11 years of Coalition Federal Government is so necessary, whether it uses that money as part of splitting the current Telstra in to the three components that it (while in government last time and for almost twenty years and counting) insisted was the only way a sensible telecommunications regime could exist in Australia.
As Telstra's current short term thinking senior management will do everything possible to prevent that happening the next 12 - 24 months will probably be wracked with even more uncertainty than now exists.
Perhaps one of the good things, if "good" is the correct word, is that nothing will change in the next two years and copper services will not be 'challenged' by a new generation of government funded fibre.
So the impact on 'deliverable services' over the next two years will be minimal.
With one major, major qualification.
What is to be done about investing in enhancements to the delivery of current ADSL services over copper in terms of what is the expected 'life time' of such investments?
Too hard to look at that very optimistically so the answer for a small company like Exetel is almost certainly going to be negative - we'll have to look to bringing 'the future' closer for 3G/wifi and wait and see what time frame actually becomes possible for fibre.
Easy decision to make and now is a good time to work on justifying doing nothing - such views always have much readier acceptance than doing something of unknown likelihood of success.