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.
"We are now fast approaching four million broadband subscribers in Australia, with an estimated 3,518,100 broadband services in Australia as of June 2006. This is despite constant carping from the Labor Party that claims Australia is a broadband backwater....And the ACCC's latest broadband snapshot shows there was an absolute increase in subscriber numbers of 346,900 in the June 2006 quarter, compared with 210,000 in the June 2004 quarter...An increase of more than one third of a million subscribers in one quarter in a finite market does not imply that broadband take-up has gone off the boil as Labor claims. Quite the contrary.
Well I have yet to see an infinite market! And the ALP was making the point that the ACCC found that growth has slowed in the most recent quarter for which the ACCC has released data (to June 2006) in the last quarter. "Even more concerning is the fact that...entry level broadband growth in Australia fell by three percent in the last quarter alone from 13.9 percent to 10.9 percent. Given this drop off in take-up growth, there is a real chance that Australia could actually go backwards in next year's OECD rankings."
In fact, in commenting on the reduced growth rate the ACCC had said "While growth is lower than previous quarters, this is to be expected given the larger base of total connections in absolute terms." But such an inconvenient truth was of course ignored.
Coonan's greatest sin was one of omission: to ignore the fact that average speeds in Australia are low in comparison to leading OECD nations, but this is not an aspect that is analysed quantitatively in the OECD statistics.
This did not stop shadow communications minister Stephen Conroy who issued a press releasee saying "The OECD's annual (it's every six months actually} broadband survey is beginning to sound like a broken record. Every time the OECD releases a report on Broadband it says the same thing: "Australia is a Broadband Backwater." In fact the OECD singled out Australia on for its above average growth rate!
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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