Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 05 June 2007 17:53
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Federal Cabinet met today to discuss the, separate, issues of what to do to resolve the current FTTN deadlock, and the Government's $600 million funding for better rural broadband. There have been no decisions announced but the signs are not promising.
The official line comes from federal treasurer, Peter Costello, who has been reported saying: "There are at least two companies or consortiums that are offering to do that at the moment, one is Telstra, the other is G9, neither of which incidentally require any public money...We had a good discussion about that and about the way in which it might proceed...I can assure you it will proceed in a way which will mean that fibre is built at no cost to the taxpayer and at the best price to the consumer...You've got two consortiums, each promising a very big rollout without any taxpayers' dollars...And the main issue seems to be who's going to be able to do it with the cheapest prices."
From these and other comments Costello made when interviewed by ABC Radio, Costello's number one priority seems to be that there should be no cost to the taxpayer, and that the resulting services should be 'affordable' for consumers (although he declined to put a figure on what he meant by that). Nor did he specify what bandwidth and how much data he expected to be delivered at this 'affordable' price.
The
decision this week by ISP Internode to hike prices on its high download plans demonstrates that already some users are downloading as much as they can afford.
Events have moved fast on the FTTN front since the Optus-led G9 consortium
lodged its special access undertaking with the ACCC last week. Ever since G9 unveiled its plan over a year ago Telstra has dismissed the proposal as a 'stunt'. Certainly it's realisation is not a high probability because it would require legislative change to gain the access it seeks to Telstra fibre at the nodes, a move which Telstra would fight to the bitter end.
However with the lodgement and publication of the SAU, Telstra has changed tack and is now focussing on how much more advanced its FTTN plan is than that of the G9. It chose to brief only select media representatives from Fairfax and News Limited in what one journalist described as "an intense and extensive four hour briefing" and "[Telstra's] most detailed briefing on its own advanced plans for a fibre broadband network. (However another journalist described event as "a rambling arm-waving press conference in which the main message was [G9 will go ahead] 'over our dead bodies'.")
