Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Telstra put the total cost at $5.7b over three years and wanted government to chip in $2.6bn. It described this as the "best solution" saying it represented the lowest cost and most effective option for most Australians, that "alternatives would be too costly or quickly overtaken by service standards in urban areas," and that it would provide a platform for future investment to 12Mbps and beyond.
12Mbps to 99 percent of urban and 94 percent of rural was presented as a more costly alternative that would require $4.7b of government funding (this is where the figure in the current NBN RFP comes from - not as the result of detailed estimates independent of Telstra).
Telstra did not specify what its contribution would be but it warned that the technology for this solution was already "being overtaken by urban standards and would create different standards across urban and rural areas."
Until, and unless we see a viable alternative proposal from the current RFP process we will have made precisely zero progress in three years. Slattery, for one believes that Australia has in fact gone backwards. He has called on G9 (now TERRiA) to boycott the entire process which he claims is completely flawed and designed, intentionally or otherwise to leave Telstra as the only party capable of responding.
TERRiA and others may have stumped up their $5m entry ticket but this should be no indication that they are really serious: they could hardly have done otherwise and the money - insignificant in the grand scheme of things will eventually be refunded. Without paying it they would not get access to the Telstra network information without which it would be impossible to accurately cost a bid.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
