The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
However he seems to have learnt one lesson: giving unrealistic deadlines is just asking for trouble. The draft instruments setting out the network information to be collected and disclosed and how it is to be protected have no fixed response date. The Department's web site say that each carrier required to provide information will be approached directly for its comments on the draft. Conroy said: "Following careful consideration of their submissions the Government will be moving to make a decision about final instruments expeditiously."
You have only to make a cursory inspection of the draft instruments http://www.dbcde.gov.au/nationalbroadbandnetwork to see that they answer fundamental questions about network information that should have been answered before the RFP was ever issued. Questions like: who is required to provide information? The answer is quite a few: AAPT, AARNet, Agile, Amcom, Digital River Networks, Macquarie Telecom, Nextgen Networks, Optus, Pipe Networks, Primus, Soul, Telstra, Transact and Vodafone.
The draft also sets out detailed specification on how information is to be presented, eg an excel spreadsheet with the content of each column specified. With the amount of information involved and the level of detail required, such level of prescription is totally understandable, and should have been a prerequisite to the issue of an RFP. Even then the 12 week timeframe would have been ridiculously short, given that this information still had to be obtained and incorporated into bidders' modelling and estimates.
I'd be very surprised if we see a closing date for the NBN RFP this side of Christmas.
David Bass
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