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.
With Telstra already having a national broadband network comprised of fixed line copper, 3.5G HSPA wireless broadband, hybrid fibre coaxial cable, all kinds of existing fibre connections between exchanges and Telstra data centers, satellite broadband and access to all the communications ducts and exchanges, why spend $43 billion to replicate all that existing infrastructure?
Far simpler and cheaper to simply part nationalise Telstra and take the assets instead, and build upon that, while in future likely explaining to the population that current economic conditions made government intervention an inevitable course of action, with existing investors paying the price for any resulting change in share price values.
It’s been less than 24 hours since the announcement on Telstra separation was made, and there’s still much road to be travelled before separation takes place, along with plenty of “hard nosed” negotiation to follow, but it just highlights once again the fact that governments don’t need to play by the rules, they can make the rules up as they go along and take whatever they want.
Given that you’d expect the government will be successful in its quest to separate Telstra, the NBN as has been promised seems destined to now be dead, with NBN CEO Michael Quigley, sitting pretty on his multi-million dollar salary, presumably enjoying the free money while this new structural separation saga unfolds.
Again, Quigley will preumably soon be the CEO of an NBN company that owns the Telstra broadband infrastructure network, or will find his position and company abolished as whoever runs the Telstra network takes over instead.
Until we hear otherwise, it looks like the NBN as promised this time, is yet again, dead, to be replaced by the network already in place – the one currently owned by Telstra!
David Bass
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