Ext User(Alan Parkington)
11-07-2007, 11:43 PM
By Jeremy Mitchell
Political editor nowwearetalking
So it has been ten years of competition. I think there is universal
agreement that competition is good for Australian Telecommunications. What
we have today is far better compared to the days of the government run
monopoly called Telecom. I remember vividly the Sunday night ritual at our
household with phone calls to my relatives in Junee and Cootamundra, the
other side of the state from my home town of Alstonville in Northern NSW.
Each Sunday night we had the family catch up. Us kids got a brief
conversation with Nan & Pa, while Dad paced up and down, tapping his watch
saying "hurry up, this is an STD call you know". That was the Telecom
monopoly life in households across Australia. No one can say they are sad to
see those days gone, but have we achieved all we could since those days?
There are people advocating that Australia has come a long way over the past
ten years, and that all is OK with our telecommunications industry. They
look at the industry and praise the competition which we now operate. Yes we
have competition; in fact Australia stands out a mile when it comes to
competition statistics. Statistics show that Australia has 157 carriers, 4
mobile operators, 23 mobile resellers and a staggering 467 Internet Service
Providers (ISP). That means Australia has 23 ISP's per million of
population, compare this with Japan with just 7 per million, followed by the
UK & Canada with 3 per million, and the USA, France and South Korea who have
2 ISP's per million. Now the ACCC perceives this is as great news but, when
you stand that far ahead, you have to ask yourself, why?
Despite all this competition Australia still has very little investment in
our industry; in fact without Telstra's spending we would see negative
growth in investment. While we may have 467 ISPs in Australia none of them
are creating infrastructure. It is similar to a market place in a developing
country. There may be hundreds of stalls, but they are all selling the same
stuff, and we the consumer are no better off. Is this really choice? Is this
really a quality service we are being provided? If competition is so strong
in Australia, why does the government need to spend a billion dollars of
taxpayer's money duplicating services in regional Australia? That doesn't
sound like a healthy telecommunications environment to me.
The fact is, in my opinion, we haven't had good telecommunications policy
management over the past ten years. The government has been busy
concentrating on the sale of Telstra and relied on the ACCC to implement
industry policy.
Where has this left us? We have no competition in regional Australia, and we
have the government spending a billion dollars of tax payer's money to
provide an incentive to a foreign Telco to venture outside the city suburbs.
We have a Fibre To The Node (FTTN) plan that has been on the table for
nearly two years and it looks like it could be there for a couple more years
because once again the bureaucrats have taken control of the decision making
process. Where has the industry been while all this was happening? Where
were the so called academics, user groups and industry bodies? Why didn't
they see this coming? Why didn't they warn us? The truth is they were
dazzled by the ACCC's fool's gold competition empire.
For nearly 18 months this website has been trying to raise the debate on
communications in this country. There has been much criticism of the
website, but the proof of its effectiveness is the growing awareness of the
problem with our industry. For too long debate on telecommunications has
been left to the users and supporters of washing machine cesspit chat rooms,
rather then taking the debate out onto a mainstream platform.
Telstra, Phil Burgess and nowwearetalking have achieved something that no
one has before - they have made telecommunications, particularly broadband,
a mainstream issue on the greater political stage. For the first time we are
debating the future of this industry; and the impact it has on Australia's
future. We are already seeing results, finally the government is reviewing
the USO, and the regulation red tape being driven by the ACCC, we may even
see something on FTTN, but let's not hold our breath.
Like it or not Telstra has created a debate that government is reacting to.
The job is far from finished and there is a lot to be done to make sure we
have something to celebrate in 2017. If we get it right, the ACCC policies
and the fools gold followers it has created will be a sad footnote in the
history of telecommunication in this country.
Political editor nowwearetalking
So it has been ten years of competition. I think there is universal
agreement that competition is good for Australian Telecommunications. What
we have today is far better compared to the days of the government run
monopoly called Telecom. I remember vividly the Sunday night ritual at our
household with phone calls to my relatives in Junee and Cootamundra, the
other side of the state from my home town of Alstonville in Northern NSW.
Each Sunday night we had the family catch up. Us kids got a brief
conversation with Nan & Pa, while Dad paced up and down, tapping his watch
saying "hurry up, this is an STD call you know". That was the Telecom
monopoly life in households across Australia. No one can say they are sad to
see those days gone, but have we achieved all we could since those days?
There are people advocating that Australia has come a long way over the past
ten years, and that all is OK with our telecommunications industry. They
look at the industry and praise the competition which we now operate. Yes we
have competition; in fact Australia stands out a mile when it comes to
competition statistics. Statistics show that Australia has 157 carriers, 4
mobile operators, 23 mobile resellers and a staggering 467 Internet Service
Providers (ISP). That means Australia has 23 ISP's per million of
population, compare this with Japan with just 7 per million, followed by the
UK & Canada with 3 per million, and the USA, France and South Korea who have
2 ISP's per million. Now the ACCC perceives this is as great news but, when
you stand that far ahead, you have to ask yourself, why?
Despite all this competition Australia still has very little investment in
our industry; in fact without Telstra's spending we would see negative
growth in investment. While we may have 467 ISPs in Australia none of them
are creating infrastructure. It is similar to a market place in a developing
country. There may be hundreds of stalls, but they are all selling the same
stuff, and we the consumer are no better off. Is this really choice? Is this
really a quality service we are being provided? If competition is so strong
in Australia, why does the government need to spend a billion dollars of
taxpayer's money duplicating services in regional Australia? That doesn't
sound like a healthy telecommunications environment to me.
The fact is, in my opinion, we haven't had good telecommunications policy
management over the past ten years. The government has been busy
concentrating on the sale of Telstra and relied on the ACCC to implement
industry policy.
Where has this left us? We have no competition in regional Australia, and we
have the government spending a billion dollars of tax payer's money to
provide an incentive to a foreign Telco to venture outside the city suburbs.
We have a Fibre To The Node (FTTN) plan that has been on the table for
nearly two years and it looks like it could be there for a couple more years
because once again the bureaucrats have taken control of the decision making
process. Where has the industry been while all this was happening? Where
were the so called academics, user groups and industry bodies? Why didn't
they see this coming? Why didn't they warn us? The truth is they were
dazzled by the ACCC's fool's gold competition empire.
For nearly 18 months this website has been trying to raise the debate on
communications in this country. There has been much criticism of the
website, but the proof of its effectiveness is the growing awareness of the
problem with our industry. For too long debate on telecommunications has
been left to the users and supporters of washing machine cesspit chat rooms,
rather then taking the debate out onto a mainstream platform.
Telstra, Phil Burgess and nowwearetalking have achieved something that no
one has before - they have made telecommunications, particularly broadband,
a mainstream issue on the greater political stage. For the first time we are
debating the future of this industry; and the impact it has on Australia's
future. We are already seeing results, finally the government is reviewing
the USO, and the regulation red tape being driven by the ACCC, we may even
see something on FTTN, but let's not hold our breath.
Like it or not Telstra has created a debate that government is reacting to.
The job is far from finished and there is a lot to be done to make sure we
have something to celebrate in 2017. If we get it right, the ACCC policies
and the fools gold followers it has created will be a sad footnote in the
history of telecommunication in this country.