I have been a firm believer for some time now that Telstra has needed to be broken up into wholesale and retail pieces. I also think that a "government controlled" entity should own the basic infrastructure to provide backhaul and the last mile - so effectively the wholesale piece minus mobile. I believe that telecommunications infrastructure is critical to the country and in Australia it is overly politicised and monopolised to no ones benefit. I think the wholesale infrastructure should be open to any "carrier" at tiered pricing based on volume purchased. Finally, I believe that government controlled entity should NOT return a profit to the government's coffers, but be mandated to spend its entire profit on upgrading the core networks and reducing the impediments to wider scale high speed communications technology to rural areas.
I do not believe in the NBN. I think it is poorly thought out and yet another instance of the politicians becoming too involved in things they don't understand. When people ask me why I don't like the NBN I usually give the glib answer, "If people in Wagga want faster access to porn, they should pay a higher price."
In many respects, my two positions seem contradictory, but let me explain. The problems in the Australian telecommunications industry are to do with issues such as: exchange access, last mile access and quality, pit access and regulated pricing. None of these will be solved by the NBN, but they would be solved by breaking up Telstra. I just think dropping some $40b on a new network to solve a regulatory issue seems like dropping a nuclear bomb to kill a mosquito.
In its current form, the NBN is misguided. It will turn out to be a government spending orgy that results in NBN PoPs in every marginal federal Labour seat in the country. Every school in a safe Labour area will have more fibre than they can shake a stick at while kids in Castle Hill in Sydney's northwest resort to tin-cans, string and carrier pigeons. I'm not simply pissing on Labour, I'm sure the Coalition would do the same thing - politicians can't help themselves. They are measured by re-election (a popularity contest) and sometimes, the important ones are considered in a historical context, but the next election is always closer.
I think the government should go through with breaking up Telstra and regulating access to the wholesale network. I think the federal government should consider what to do with the national fibre networks of NextGen and Optus as part of the wholesale scheme. If they really wanted to make telecommunications cheaper and better, they'd probably buy both, plus look at the undersea assets in and out of Australia. Australians pay a fairly hefty price for internet access because of peering costs on undersea cables to the US, which is where the bulk of the content lives. If you could eliminate the excessive gouging in that area, you'd be onto a winner. Ultimately, let that piece of policy shake out and then see if we need to spend all this money. We very well may need to and if the country needs and wants that, then great, spend away, but right now it seems that the market may sort this out itself.
My last thought is on hypocrisy. The Howard Government were bitterly opposed by the now governing Labour party when they went through the process of selling Telstra. The Howard Government made the Telstra debate part of their election platforms. Labour has decided to break-up Telstra and have set a deadline effectively for doing so that would preclude the electorate from getting a say on a significant decision. Labour obviously doesn't want to have done to it, what it encourage the labour unions to do to the Coalition during the last campaign on WorkChoices and that's run ads all over the place slamming Labour's decisions on telecommunications - the government is trying to keep Telstra's marketing machine on the sidelines.
I suppose the part I find most hypocritical though is that Labour were opposed to selling Telstra, yet they inherited the Future Fund which was made up of the proceeds from that sale and now they are breaking up the goose that laid the golden egg so they can spend the proceeds that may not need to be spent to fulfill a poorly constructed election promise that has become bigger than Ben Hur. It just doesn't pass the smell test with me.
