Telco leaders unite to pan NBN & lobby for ubiquitous wireless 'NBN 3.0' - UPDATED

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 31 August 2010 17:49

IT Industry - Strategy

Executives from seven of Australia's telcos have united to lobby against the NBN, claiming Australia's broadband future is best left to the market, and best served by ubiquitous wireless coverage.

They have formed the Alliance for Affordable Broadband and have issued a 'Manifest' proposing, under the moniker, NBN 3.0, an approach broadly in line with Coalition policy, saying: "We believe the argument for a national fibre-only NBN solution has failed to convince.

"For the short to medium term we see, globally, no demonstrated mass requirement for the 'up to 1Gbps' speeds to homes and SOHO. Instead, we see the greatest priority is giving broadband to those who don't have any, not faster broadband to those that have."

The alliance members are BigAir CEO, Jason Ashton; AAPT CEO, Paul Broad; EFTel CEO, John Lane; Pipe Networks founder, Bevan Slattery; Vocus CEO, James Spenceley' Polyfone (a microwave network operator) CEO, Paul Wallace and Allegro Networks (a wireless network operator similar to BigAir) CEO David Waldie.

The have aimed the manifest squarely at the independent MPs saying "We believe that a well-informed Independent member of parliament might wisely favour an NBNv3 public/private model on a mix of technologies, with deliverables within a term, over a more costly and more risky 8+ year NBN 2.0 rollout."

They are strongly advocating a '4G' wireless network, saying "In Australia, you might expect to cover 98 percent of our 22 million people who occupy a much smaller portion of the landmass than is the case in the US for $3 billion or less with a large part of this delivered by private investment. We believe further research should be undertaken on such a proposal."

Key points from the manifest are:
- the Federal government's primary role is setting policy frameworks that incentivises markets to build network infrastructure;

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