Stuart Corner
Friday, 14 December 2007 17:39
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
After examining the state of Australia's telecoms infrastructure, Engineers Australia has bemoaned the lack of any national vision or strategic plan for telecommunications and says that one is urgently needed.
It seems blindingly obvious, and it has all been said before but has fallen on the deaf ears of successive governments that have, by and large, been happy to let the forces of the market and competition hold sway subject mainly to rules designed to curb the dominant position of the former monopoly.
This has resulted in several decades of failed investments and unnecessary duplication or multiplication of infrastructure in the name of competition, in piecemeal government interventions too numerous to mention and Clayton's strategies developed by successive governments that have been forgotten almost as soon as they have been published.
Are things going to change? Right now, new government notwithstanding, Australia is heading for having three separate and competing sets of cellular infrastructure serving around 95 percent of the population, thanks to recent announcements by Optus and Vodafone. Competition all the way down to the infrastructure level may well make sense in metropolitan areas, but in sparsely population rural areas at all it seems to make no sense at all. That is the conclusion Engineers Australia has come to, but whether the powers that be will take any notice of that august body remains to be seen.
Engineers Australia has just published its 2007 Telecommunications Infrastructure Report Card, saying there is "A long-term, rolling, regularly reviewed and updated strategic plan for telecommunications infrastructure development for the whole nation must be developed as a matter of urgency." It also concludes that "Unnecessary duplication of infrastructure should be avoided, particularly where government subsidies are given. Where there are no government subsidies, policies should encourage carriers to avoid duplications through appropriate access regimes.
