John Linton The recent 'getting closer to an agreement' reports of the 'final' deal between Telstra and the 'NBN2' are reaching a crescendo with the predictable nonsense of how 'unfair' it will be from the predictable critics. Off course it was always going to be 'unfair' because that is the nature of monopolies even when an old monopoly is ceding its gouging rights to a new monopoly. Why would anyone with even a vague grasp of commercial/government operations believe it would be otherwise? Of course they wouldn't. So An ex government monopoly will provide some of its assets to a new government monopoly for some amount of money - who cares? As one of my 'children' reminded me when the topic cropped up the other day - "do you remember what I paid for my Telstra II share's?" Maybe whatever Telstra gets for being forced to cede some of its assets will close the gap between the current Telstra share price and what the Telstra II buyers paid for their shares but I doubt it.
The whinging about the Telstra/'NBN2' "deal" and the recent NextGen announcement of its 'NBN2' connectivity offer begins to bring an 'immediacy' (at least in relative terms) to just what it all means in terms of the future provision of residential communications services to Australians....well, in 4 or 5 years time perhaps. Because the hyped up media coverage has been going on for so long and with such a constantly regurgitated mish mash of just plain wrong information and downright stupidity and mindless speculation the fact that the 'NBN2' will make absolutely no difference whatsoever to many individual Australian's lives in any way at all seems to have been overlooked. The only difference will be that Australian's will pay more for some basic communications that they do today and will have less choice in being forced to pay more.
The point about the NextGen announcement was that it was the first of the offers from an 'aggregator' that is willing to provide 'NBN2' connectivity to wholesale customers which means that more of the current 'smaller' providers will be able to provide wide coverage when the 'NBN2' eventually becomes available in a sensible chunk of Australia. We would expect Optus to provide the same service and it seems likely that Telstra will also provide a wholesale 'NBN2' offering. So, a sensible person might ask, "what has changed from the way things would be without a taxpayer waste of tens of billions of dollars. The answer, of course, has always been - "absolutely nothing". Apart from the few percent of the rural and regional population (certainly less than double figures) who will over the coming decade be able to get a fibre service that will cost them more for less than a wireless service they would be able to get by the same time nothing will change for anyone - except it will be more expensive than it is today.
I have found one benefit to broadband users of the 'NBN2'. Current users of ADSL services are reaping major benefits from the carrier's lowering their costs to wholesale customers for ADSL and other communications services to well below the proposed 'NBN2' wholesale costs - and of course the speed for most 'city dwellers' is the same or faster. What this seems to mean is that for the coming years Australians will be getting broadband at lower costs than at any time in the past and also lower costs than at any time in the future.
I knew, if you looked hard enough for long enough, there would be a benefit (other than fooling the Australian electorate) in wasting so much tax payer money. Perhaps a coalition government will still scrap the whole stupidity if there is a change of government in 2013 - still a possibility.
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