So, it turns out that the Government does actually have some balls, as they have officially excluded Telstra from the National Broadband Network process after they lodged an incomplete bid back in November. Telstra claims that the official reason they’ve been kicked out is because the Government claims they “did not include a plan for how to involve small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the building of the NBN” and is kicking up a stink about it being a peripheral issue.
A lot of pundits reckon the next step for Telstra is to harass the government and the eventual winner of the tender either with lawsuits or other tactics so that the NBN is ultimately delayed. If they do, I hope to God the government comes back at them with a swift kick in the nuts – the longer this whole NBN fiasco drags on, the less time we all get to spend with super-fast internet, which just isn’t acceptable.
[Telstra]
Fordi
Monday, December 15, 2008 at 11:25 AMI completely disagree. The governments RFT was ridiculous given the situation that they already put Telstra in as a part govt controlled entity. The last thing I want to see is a tender that only receives one response, from a foreign country, who then takes forever to deploy a second rate network and significantly higher cost than was expected.
Ryan
Monday, December 15, 2008 at 1:49 PMI know there is probably a very good reason for why not, but why can’t the NextG network be strengthened (and possibly subsidised) to provide this kind of broad coverage?
Ouwannano
Monday, December 15, 2008 at 1:52 PMI disagree with this article. I think everyone forgets that Telstra is heavily regulated to STOP them from being a monopoly. This is the reason why they can’t compete or even undercut their competitors.
NBN is a massive investment, you looking at rolling fibre optics across Australia and pulling out the copper network.
In new estates it be easy because copper isn’t there, but you talking about the metropolitan areas which is writh with mazes of copper pair gains. Out in the regional areas you looking at wireless as the best form of technology, you be crazy to run fibre optics across hundreds of kms to get from one exchange to another.
It costs billions of dollars every year to maintain the copper network, something the winning tender is going to struggle find finance with in these financial conditions.
And you are not even thinking about the support costs of building the optic fibre network, like nation-wide call centres for customer complaints, network services to monitor an incidents, the support workforce is huge.
Remember the govt still owns 30% of Telstra, your tax paying money. Why would they want to give these money to foreign companies? Singtel is own by the Singapore govt, who owns Optus, guess where the money goes at the end of the day?
I would love to see FTTN or even FFTP get through. But I don’t want to see another “Sydney City-tunnel”, where the NSW stuffed up with their contract clauses and were held ransom to some foreign company, who charged whatever they wanted and when they get the revenue from commuters they sued the govt.
In the end its the tax payers who will pay for poor decision making.
rangott
Monday, December 15, 2008 at 3:47 PMI agree with fordi, ryan and ouwannano but I still wanted to have my own rant
After the set top box article this is another kick in my nuts from the government. Telstra is the only Australian entity that can build a NBN. I admit I have shares in telstra but I also admit that I wont ever use them as a ISP, at least until the price comes down. However if Telstra builds the network we know we ill get good service and prices from other ISPs (iinet, internode) as we do now.
Point being however is I want our investment in our NBN to stay in Australia not singapore.
Laminer
Monday, December 15, 2008 at 7:01 PMGovernment one, Telstra nil.
Telstra will take plan b off the shelf and expand the HFC network in metropolitan area’s. The bush will get screwed by this one. In the long run Telstra will get its way.