[LINK] Ergas article in the Oz

[Crispin Harris]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 7:31 AM, Richard Chirgwin
<rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au>wrote:

> > I agree re the competition of the two/three systems to keep prices
> > down.
> I'm not so inclined to see this as an issue. We don't have a competitive
> consumer access network today on the copper - with the limited exception
> of HFC, every fixed customer network is a monopoly.
>
> I am excluding the discussion of corporate-level fibre networks here...
>
> 1. Twisted pair network - Telstra.
> 2. HFC network - Telstra and Optus, but limited capacity for expansion
> either of footprint or of customer base. No competitive service provision.
> 2a. Some localised HFC networks exist - Neighborhood Cable (owned by
> TransACT), e-Wire in WA, and an Austar system in Darwin. That's all I
> can call to mind.
> 3. Consumer fibre - only in new housing estates, and only as a local
> monopoly.
>

And even then (3) is not really a *retail* competitive environment anyway.

This is one of the nastiest little scams that I have seen for a while. A
frend of mine recently bought a house in a new greenfields estate with FTTH.
After months of discussion and reading the relevant regulations, he realised
that the FTTH environment was a Telstra Bigpond closed shop and that
bringing in another provider would require spending BIG $$, pre-signing
multiple customers in the estate and the external provider was not allowed
to start the process of adding equipment until the estate was officially
'handed off' (about 85% of houses completed, all services installed and
operational, an most houses occupied for > 6 months).

After further discussion, he was advised that his service would be more
expensive (and slower) than the current ADSL2+ Telstra service in the rental
he was moving out of.

To top it all off, he was advised that this was neither anti-competitive,
nor a restraint on trade - because it was part (and un-specified part) of
the contract of sale for the house - the estate company were required to
provide access to a telephony service, but nothing said that they had to
provide access to a comptitive service.

Sigh.


> So: the NBN replaces (1) and has a mechanism for incorporating (3) into
> the architecture. The new deal excludes Telstra's HFC network from the
> broadband market (timetable to be set), but doesn't involve removing the
> HFC network completely.
>

<snip>

(My own pet peeve - sorry)

Cheers,
  Crispin
-- 
Crispin Harris
crispin.harris at gmail.com
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