Maybe Telstra Never Wanted To Win NBN

David Heath
Tuesday, 16 December 2008 07:10

IT Industry - Market

Interviewed on this morning’s AM (ABC Radio) show, Telstra Chairman Donald McGauchie seemed to suggest that the company has plenty of plans to move ahead in ways that don’t include the National Broadband Network (NBN).

Initially in the interview, McGauchie took the Government to task over throwing them out of the process on what he claimed was a minor or trivial reason and then took the opportunity to suggest the parties still in the running would have “issues of funding and capacity.”

That may-well be the case.

However, of greater interest was the path the interview took when the conversation turned to “shareholder value.”

Initially, in response to a question regarding the sudden drop in share price yesterday, McGauchie responded, “But I think what's far more important is, if we had have stepped into the unknown, if we'd have stepped into a black hole without knowing what the outcomes of that were, or what the rules were, the risks of that were far far greater than anything we've seen.”

Fair enough – I think he’s telling us that Telstra didn’t really want to get involved in NBN at all.  He’s suggesting that the project was poorly defined with uncertain rules.

When pressed on whether Telstra might attempt to get back into the NBN process, his answer seemed to offer some interesting insight.  “That's currently going on, it's going to run its course and we're not part of that process. … But the real issue here is that from Telstra's point of view, this is going to have negligible impact on us in the short term and as these people try to get their act together, we will have well and truly moved on from here.

“We will have moved on to other platforms, other technologies and other opportunities for the company that we think provide a much better outlook for our business and taking a risk on the unknown of a black hole that this could have created for us.”

So, where is Telstra going to take us?