Home Industry Strategy Telstra could adopt 'scorched earth' policy to stymie NBN
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Ironically, such a move could increase the value of the HFC network owned and operated by Optus, Telstra's biggest competitor.

The scorched earth policy could extend beyond metropolitan areas currently served by cable.

"While around $3.1 billion or 13 per cent of our FY08 sales revenue was non-metro retail PSTN and broadband, much of this revenue could also be migrated onto other networks in the years before an NBN service would be rolled out," said Trujilo.

Presumably he's talking about exploiting the coverage of Telstra's 3G network, "the first in the world" to deliver peak throughput speeds of 21 Mbps.

If Telstra came up with a scheme to provide customers with mobile plans that mirrored fixed-line tariffs, it could migrate them quite easily and quickly, and then pull out enough of the copper to make it uneconomical for a competitor to employ FTTN.

As far as I know, there's nothing in the standard contract that says Telstra has to use a particular technology to deliver services.

About the only good thing about this scenario is that we would be spared the prospect of interminable litigation over the amount Telstra should be paid to compensate it for the use of its copper network by the NBN.

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Stephen Withers

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Stephen Withers is one of Australia¹s most experienced IT journalists, having begun his career in the days of 8-bit 'microcomputers'. He covers the gamut from gadgets to enterprise systems. In previous lives he has been an academic, a systems programmer, an IT support manager, and an online services manager. Stephen holds an honours degree in Management Sciences, a PhD in Industrial and Business Studies, and is a senior member of the Australian Computer Society.

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