Australian Telstra Monopoly Dead 100
philmarcracken writes "The Senate recently passed a bill through the Lower House for the separation of Telstra's retail and wholesale arms and now that same bill has just scraped by in the Upper House; 30 to 28. The deal is worth $11 billion AUD for Telstra and is welcomed by them despite Coalition opposition. This paves the way for the governmental body NBNco to use Telstra's existing assets and expedite laying fibre optic cables to the larger population densities."
If Telstra is for it, you can bet it's no good (Score:2, Insightful)
If a monopoly is happy to go along with a government decision to break it up, you can bet that there's some massive upside for the company. That doesn't necessarily mean better anything for the customer.
About time! (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a moment too soon! Telstra should have been split up when it was privatised. Their constant anti-competitive antics have held Australian telecoms back ever since.
Mod parent up. (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that this was not done years ago (heavy Kevvy was talking about it since he was elected) was the fact that Telstra fought it tooth and nail. But it's done now and there is nothing more Telstra can do about it.
Realistically this is something the Howard government should have done when Telstra was privatised in the 90's.
Sigh, (Score:2, Insightful)
Just so everyone on /. understands, The Australian is the equivalent of Fox News when it comes to the current government. Nothing in that paper can be considered accurate about the NBN.
The average broadband speed in AU is 1.6 Mbit/s. It's terrible. If you want a guaranteed 10 Mbit/s pipe you are looking at A$1400 per month. I live a bit over 3 KM from my exchange and get a sync speed on my DSL of 4 Mbit/s. More people in AU have a slower sync speed than a higher sync speed in this country.
Also when you do these rants, differentiate between MB (megabytes) and Mb or Mbit (megabit) and specify that it is per second (Mbit/s).
Hasn't been the case in Tassie, outright lies good sir. NBNco will connect to one point inside your house the same as if it were a Telstra telephone connection.
If you don't have an active (copper) telephone line to your house at the moment, Telstra charge $400 for connection. This is just to get it made active at the exchange, then you need to pay any fees your service provider asks. You don't want to know the costs if you don't already have copper to your door.
Now Wireless, there's a plan that needs to be replaced every few years. HSPA networks that were installed 5 years ago are already at the end of their life, Telstra and Optus are testing LTE and WiMax is already deployed by Vivid Wireless. Wireless may only be 6 Billion now, but it's another 6 billion every 5 years not to mention that it will never match the speed and latency of multi mode fibre. Fibre has a lifespan of at least 40 years, the expected lifespan on fibre is 60 years if it's been flexed so independent MP Tony Windsor put it best when he said "You do it once, you do it right, you do it fibre".
Uninformed Luddites are ruining our country good sir. For the last 50 years we've been technological leaders with things like CSIRO and world class universities, why do you want to throw this away. Really, if you want to save some serious taxpayer $$$ dump the baby bonus scheme.
Re:NBN waste of money (Score:3, Insightful)
Sir, you get:
+2 internets for reference to the late Douglas Adams
+1 internets for reference to monty python
+3 real life merit points for telling it how it fucking is
Good job.
Yes, futureproof... (Score:3, Insightful)
Important point: It's not an infrastructure loss, it's an infrastructure upgrade, and no copper will be ripped up until all the fibre is in place.
Leaving in the copper for duplication was certainly considered, but the significant advantages caused by a relatively fast national switchover to high-speed fibre won the day (100% uptake = lower prices for all + much wider market for high-speed data services like IPTV, electronic health record transmission, next-gen internet applications etc).
Turnbull does have a few clues about this (that's why he has shares in Melbourne IT; he can see where this is going), and I don't think for a minute that he personally believes Abbott's plan of a little wireless bandaid around the edges is anything more than a stopgap response (it's hardly futureproof in any sense). However, since Abbott booted him from the top spot (shame that) he doesn't have much say in the matter anymore, and now has to toe the party line and just do his assigned job of "demolishing" the Government wherever he can.
Oh, and fibre on the poles? It's going alongside the copper, through Telstra's conduits, ducts, poles; wherever the copper goes - that was one of the main points of the deal with Telstra after all.
Re:NBN waste of money (Score:3, Insightful)
What's to own? Road traffic is mainly road trains so why bother. Population density is 0.0001 in most of WA. As the poster above you pointed out, there are 2.3 million people in WA and 1.6 million live in a 80 KM radius of one place (land mass of Western Australia is 2,645,615 KM2).
Land that is away from Perth is essentially worthless unless you have it under good authority that there is something worth mining under it.