GSM cellular turns twenty

Stuart Corner
Friday, 07 September 2007 17:14

Opinion and Analysis

After a lengthy evaluation Austel produced   draft report at the end of March 1990 in which it recommended two new cellular operators be permitted to compete with Telstra and that the new entrants be free to implement the digital technology of their choosing

Austel concluded: "It is essential that decisions on telecommunications policy focus on services not the technologies employed. To do otherwise entails an attempt to pick technology winners and losers, a process fraught with risk as technological change and development does not respect boundaries imposed by policy makers and regulators."

However, Austel recommended that the two competitors to Mobilenet (Telstra) be prohibited from implementing any form of analogue network, instead being required to resell capacity bought wholesale from Telecom.

Telecom was not in the least impressed, but its warnings of the folly of Austel's decision proved spectacularly false. Managing director Mel Ward described Austel's recommendations as "a victory for foreign investors and a defeat for mobile telephone customers." (sound familiar!)

He dismissed Austel's recommendation on three operators as "an experimental model (which) might deliver benefits some time in the 21st century."

Ward said the recommendations for competition in the mobile network would allow Telecom and new entrants to do well but only at the price of increased costs for customers. He said that additional infrastructure costs would be "passed on to the consumer and over the next decade could cost mobile users more than $1-billion."

He said the airtime reselling system "will provide no new or different products but, on overseas experience, will cost customers 15 to 20 percent more."

In some ways, nothing much has changed!