Stuart Corner
Thursday, 08 March 2007 11:29
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Communications minister, Helen Coonan's address to the Australian Telecommunications Users Group (ATUG) annual conference this morning was long on platitudes and truisms and short on news and hard announcements. No surprises there.
However, for this cynical and jaded observer (I've been reading/listening to these things for nigh on two decades) one statement stood out. Coonan summed up developments to date on the rival proposals for fibre to the node (FTTN) networks saying:
"It is indeed welcome news that the larger telcos in Australia are willing to consider how best to rollout a next generation network that would benefit millions of consumers – even if it would be contained to a major metropolitan footprint."
She then made what at first glance seemed like an innocuous comment: "Clearly we cannot countenance the same inefficiencies that accompanied the duplicated rollout of HFC cable in the 90s."
I agree, and while such a possibility is remote. It will be no thanks the Government if such an undesirable scenario is avoided.
In case you are not familiar with the HFC debacle: Optus, frustrated at the price charged by Telstra for access to the copper pairs providing the only access to the great majority of Australian homes and businesses decided it had to build its own network and the only way to make this viable was for it to carry pay TV as well as telephony (never mind that the technology of carrying telephony along with pay TV on a HFC cable was barely out of the laboratory).
