Stuart Corner
Thursday, 13 March 2008 11:48
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 4
Meanwhile Axia had put in a bid also for the full $600m on a similar basis but without any assets in place to start from. It had, however teamed up with two state governments - Queensland and Victoria -and planned to make use of their infrastructure and traffic to make its bid viable and attractive.
Axia chairman and CEO, Art Price as in Australia last May detailing the company's operations overseas. He was back again at the Atug Conference this week with a similar message, and more. And his company's track record gives him street cred aplenty in this business.
Axia is a specialist builder of no-conflict open access networks: it does not offer services to end users and treats all access seekers to its networks equally. In Canada it has built the Alberta SuperNet, a regional network linking metropolitan centres and a lot of other places implementing a policy decision from the government that it did not want regional areas left behind. That network has been up and running for 2.5 years and spans 13500km and serves 75 specialist local access service providers. As Price said this week: "It is now well past the sustainability and proving the concept stage."
Additionally, Axia has built 12 regional networks in France where the Government set up a $3.5 billion fund available for regional Governments to go out and procure regional networks départment (province) by départment. Axia has won 12 and, according to Price, has never lost against France Telecom. In total these networks cover 5.2m people 332 communities and thousands of businesses.
So, given Axia's track record what Price says should be taken seriously. And here is what he was saying this week at the Atug conference.
- "The local access within a market is economic. It is the distance from that market to a global interconnect point that is uneconomic."
- "Telstra's approach is gain an unregulated monopoly of the fibre grid and leverage that to grow the big opportunity of NGN services business consistent with the old business model: own, control and dominate the network and as much of the retail market as possible. The policy framework must come to grips with that. We see it everywhere in the world and only those governments that tackle this problem actually get over into the hump of the next generation value chain to serve end users."
- "Operational separation and weak structural separation does not deconstruct the old business model."
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