Conroy's finest hour or depth of despair as NBN decision looms

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 10 March 2009 19:03

Opinion and Analysis

Anyone who doubts that the timing of Telstra's DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade to its cable network announcement yesterday was a direct nose thumb at the NBN has blinkers on. Telstra cable already goes past 2.5 million homes and giving them access to 100 Mbps would put them in a different league to the services the NBN could provide.

Some might say that's just a quarter of the homes in Australia and Telstra might be too expensive for many users. Yes but that wouldn't be the case if there was an opposing NBN network being built.

Telstra would get extremely aggressive with its prices with an NBN being built - great for the consumer but bad for Telstra's would-be competitor.

Then of course, Telstra could decide to implement its own FTTN or even FTTH network to compete with the NBN. The Government could try to stop it but if the NBN is a non-government enterprise like Telstra, then trying to stop Telstra from competing could be viewed as anti-competitive.

With Telstra expressing in no uncertain terms its intention to compete with the NBN, whoever Senator Conroy announces as the winning bidder is not going to have much time to pop champagne corks.

Finding the backers prepared to stump up $10 billion or more to take on Telstra on its home turf in the midst of the worst economic crisis the world has seen in 80 years is not going to be a walk in the park.

Even Optus is only prepared to put up $2 billion at most and will need to seek financial partners. If the winning bidder or bidders turn out to be duds, globe trotting Senator Conroy may as well pack his bags and join Sol Trujillo on an extended vacation.