[LINK] Telstra - taking its ball and going home.

[Frank O'Connor]

The government was planning to make $2-3 billion available as part of 
their ploy for appeasing the Nationals on the Telstra sale ... which 
presumably would have gone into the infrastructuring of remote 
non-urban areas that Telstra would have considered uneconomic.

Now ... $2-3 billion buys an awful lot of fibre to the town (most of 
which is already there in Victoria and NSW) and Satellite and 
Wireless and other means to the farm. Telstra was of the opinion this 
was insufficient ... so maybe they could let us know what would be 
sufficient.

The bottom line I suppose is that Telstra wants nothing to do with 
the bush, the government relies on the bush for votes and seats, and 
in any event the bush deserves some consideration viz-a-viz 
telecommunications.

None of the above of course excuses Telstra for its 20-30 years of 
neglect of the network. They had the right idea in the late 70's ... 
"lets lay fibre" ... but they never took it to its proper conclusion. 
(Perhaps because the governments of the time were more interested in 
their annual multi-billion dollar dividend than providing network 
infrastructure, and since the privatisation this mind-set didn't 
change. As I said in an earlier post ... bean counters run Telstra.)

Net result: A dinosaur has more prospects of survival than an 
increasingly obsolete Telstra. They're way slow on the wholesale end, 
still have to get to grips with the 'client satisfaction' and 
'service' and 'value' things on the retail end, and unless Sol really 
pulls a rabbit out of the hat tomorrow ... are bereft of ideas, plans 
and strategies for the future.

							Regards,

At 12:08 PM +1000 9/8/06, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
>Howard Lowndes wrote:
>>...and once again the rural/regionals have to wait.  I have 2 
>>clients whose circuits have only just been upgraded (or perhaps the 
>>dBA standards threshold has been downgraded) enough to enable 
>>vanilla DSL.
>>
>>In fact one rural customer has 10 lines into their premises and 
>>only 1 came up to snuff, the other were either RIMs or just plain 
>>too noisy.
>
>...so whose responsibility is this and how should this 
>infrastructure be funded...there was a snippet about Telstra 
>agreeing to do the rural stuff if the other telcos paid for it, 
>presumeably through the USO.
>
>Marghanita
>--
>Marghanita da Cruz
>Ramin Communications
>http://www.ramin.com.au
>Phone: 0414-869202
>Email: marghanita at ramin.com.au
>
>
>
>
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