It's broadband spin-doctoring time again

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 17 October 2006 07:09

Opinion and Analysis

"Some interesting questions have also emerged from the data: 1. What is it about Northern Europe that constantly pushes it to the lead of nearly all telecommunications rankings? What can other countries learn from Northern Europe and their different approach to rolling out networks? Answer: Something that has helped is that Nordic countries have embraced alternative ways of bringing broadband to consumers. Public utilities and municipalities are putting in their own fibre infrastructure that is typically available to any company that wants to rent a portion of it."

This was exactly the model advocated by Bill St Arnaud, a director of Canada's Research Network at a forum in Canberra organised by the Competitive Carriers Coalition and AAPT in 2004, when the debate about structural separation of Telstra was raging.

St Arnaud contended that the route to rapid rollout of future high bandwidth access networks was not structural separation of the incumbent, but the encouragement and protection of many local area fibre optic networks. He also called on the Government to eschew the US model - and Telstra's much sought after option - of offering relief for access regulation to the incumbent's new network rollout, "particularly because there is so little competition in Australia".

The alternative, which he claimed to be already well-developed in Canada, was for government to fund and facilitate the deployment of new, local access networks. He suggested that governments should not own these networks but should regulate to ensure they were protected from incumbents for "at least the first decade" of their operational life.

He said that the model presented an opportunity for the Australian Government to transform Australia's broadband laggard status into one of world leadership and that it had already demonstrated its ability to do this in the case of AARNet, which he said had been "recognised as one of the world's leading customer-owned fibre networks and that "in the last five years Australia has shown incredible leadership and vision" in building it.

"The Government should take an active role in building an infrastructure that enables competition not from one or two players, but from many players," St Arnaud suggested.

So you see there's real scope for using the OECD's broadband report to make meaningful comments and initiate some real debate on broadband in Australia, rather than twisting the statistics for cheap shots at the other party.