T4 accuses Telstra of “nonsense” over NBN pricing

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Thursday, 09 October 2008

Page 1 of 2 ! Dubbing Telstra’s recent statements as an “amazing broadband price yo-yo” and accusing Telstra over its ability to count or be honest over the cost of the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN), the T4 (Tell the Trust Telstra) coalition says it’s all a load of “nonsense”. How much will it cost to build Australia’s Notional Broadband Notwork? Excuse the deliberate misspelling, it’s been a penchant of mine ever since the nauseating brouhaha never (NBN) seems to stop over what is meant to be one of Australia’s most important infrastructure projects. Telstra and its competitors are not locked in a cooperative effort to build the NBN, but instead in a fierce battle to one-up the other, and Australians could be forgiven for thinking the NBN will never be built nationally (NBBN) at all. T4 (Tell the Truth Telstra) says that Telstra’s CEO, Sol Trujillo, “yesterday knocked $5-10 billion off the last price tag that Telstra put on the network build”, which is a “sudden drop in its (Telstra’s) claimed costs of a new NBN.”   T4 says that Trujillo commented: "We're talking about a build that's probably going to exceed $10 billion and could be as high as $15 billion in total costs to build, if all objectives were to be met."   T4 says it’s baffled by Telstra's cost estimates which seem to “exhibit a frightening degree of flexibility”, saying the NBN was being touted from 2005 to August 2007 to cost AUD $9.6 billion, “before Mr Trujillo revealed in May (2008) that the price had suddenly leapt to $15 billion.”   Then T4 notes that in “June, less than a month later, Telstra chairman Donald McGauchie announced that the build cost had spun wildly out of control, and was now $25 billion.”   The difference between $9.6 billion and $25 billion is clearly no small change you’ll find under the couch, so it’s no surprise that T4 reminds us it “warned at the time that this was an alarming, Zimbabwe-like inflation rate of 330% for the project” in a 27th June 2008 press release entitled 'Shock Horror! Telstra Reveals Telecommunications Inflation Crisis' (details of which are on page 2).   T4 is now flabbergasted that yesterday, “the cost had collapsed again to near to the original estimate, according to Mr Trujillo.”   So, why does T4 believe that an un-Zimbabwe like deflation has suddenly struck the projected cost of building the NBN? Please read on to page 2. << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

< Next story in category		Previous story in the category >

Visitors last 30 days Suscribers

904,266 13,751