Cranky Queenslander

Everyone by now has read about the terrible treatment dealt out to a 14 year old girl on public radio by her mother and radio host Kyle Sandilands. I don’t need to repeat the details here, but I wanted to briefly register my continued disgust with this grub, and suggest we as a community should not tolerate this garbage.

I think this piece at the Herald Sun sums it up for me, and I cannot believe there are enough Victorians that are prepared to listen to the tripe that Sandilands is serving up as entertainment to keep him employed.

Come on Victoria, Stand up for whats right and stop listening!

Another article on ZDNet about Telstra and the FTTN proposal and this time the headline suggests that it is a given that Telstra will need to be split in two if it wins the FTTN bid.

Some time back I wrote to the previous communications minister asking why the previous government wasn’t looking at splitting Telstra into a wholesale and retail business. At the time I got a wishy washy answer suggesting that for all intents and purposes, Telstra was already split in two.

We all know thats a load of rubbish, and I can only hope that over the next few months, someone in the Labor party has the guts to stand up and say what needs to be said, that Telstra should be forced to split into two.

I would go as far as to suggest that the wholesale arm should be regulated such that a single retail telco can only hold a small percentage of its stock, and perhaps the business should be audited by government each year to ensure a level playing field in telecoms service.

The vast sums of money that could be saved from having a single front end telecoms network would be enormous. ISP’s could stop spending large wads of cash fitting out exchanges with their own equipment, and could concentrate on the back end stuff that sets them apart.

Here’s hoping some common sense prevails for a change.

I was reading an article on ZDNet this morning regarding comments from the Auditor General relating to a claim by the opposition that the RFP for labor’d grand FTTN plan might be anti competative.

In a funny twist of irony, the Auditor General stated both that the RFP was fine, and that it did in fact include clauses that would allow for anti competitive behaviour on the part of the government.

Amendments to the RFP would be required for non-compliant bids to be accepted. The ANAO notes that the RFP provides the flexibility to make such amendments, should the government choose to do so.

Sweet; So we have bids put in, the government pre determines the winner and just changes the rules to suit the bid they want.

The longer this goes on the more it looks like the government have an agenda to hand Telstra large sums of tax payer money for basically nothing, and I have to wonder why that would be.

I’ll write more on this topic this week.

I thought I would kick off this new blog with a foray into the world of the Labor Party and its plans for broadband in Australia. Today I think I’ll go over the main points of contention as they stand, and over the coming months, will delve a little deeper into some of them as things develop.

Open Access

The only way Labor’s plan has any hope of achieving a positive result for Australians is if the network is open and available to retailers on fair and equitable terms. Senator Conroy’s call for proposals clearly states this as a requirement, but doubt remains as to the seriousness of the government’s commitment to open access.

The reason is twofold. First, Telstra had the capital and the will to build a FTTN network some years ago, but when told they would have to provide open access to that network, Telstra simple said no, and did nothing. Second, the recently scuttled initiative from the OPEL consortium would have provided what the government is currently wanting to provide, and yet they cancelled the contract, which would only have cost 1 Billion dollars. OPEL / Optus and perhaps the G9 are the only groups likely to be able to mount a serious effort to build a national network.

As the goverment is clearly pro Telstra (for reasons I have yet to fathom), it seems a foregone conclusion that Telstra will eventually win the bid. And with Telstra already on the record as being against open access, the public is left wondering how we will get the open network the government has promised us.

Add to that the fact that the Senator has also called for submissions on regulatory changes that may help facilitate the network rollout, and you start to wonder if the master plan is in fact to legislate against forced open access provisions, and to allow Telstra to build its FTTN network, shut out competitors and pocket the $5 billion.