[LINK] "Shutting down copper is a really dumb thing to do"

[Jan Whitaker]

At 07:56 AM 9/11/2011, Frank O'Connor wrote:

>Perhaps in America, with its economies of scale and huge customer 
>numbers (about 170 million or more fixed line connections) big 
>telcos could afford to run two 'systems' in tangent.

The other problem with taking much of what this new CEO says is that 
he comes from an American psyche (I did NOT say psycho, Roger). Being 
one myself (American, that is) as well as Australian, I've had this 
debate with Americans within the last few months who do not 
understand how social democracies work in terms of economic 
decisions. I thought the Australian system was whacky when I moved 
here too, and it took a while to come to understand and love the 
Australian way. But we Aussies just do things differently when it 
comes to government projects, common good projects that help the 
whole country. The US has steered clear of such things since the 1930s.

Americans in general despise large government projects that are 
supposedly possible to be done by private enterprise. In fact, 
government agencies are precluded from doing things themselves that 
can be bought from private business. I worked in the public sector 
and we had our hands tied a few times for things we wanted to do 
unless there was specific legislation saying it was our brief to do 
it. We had a super duper teleconference network in our college and 
could not use it for other than educational services, even though we 
had groups come to us wanting to use it for meetings and would have 
paid for the access. We got away with a home-bound church service for 
some reason, I think because it was a non-profit church and we didn't 
charge them anything beyond cost recovery for staff on the Sunday.

The telling statement by this guy in the article: "Fibre is not for 
everybody," he said. "Those kinds of policies just rub me the wrong way".
Who cares if it rubs him the wrong way? That's what told me he's 
responding from a cultural misunderstanding rather than basing it on 
any sort of facts or study. It doesn't say how long he's been here, 
but my guess is not very long at all. Then again, he may be in the 
Malcolm Turnbull camp of economics.

Hopefully, unlike Sol and his amigos, the Primus CEO will get with 
the 'Aussie way' in order to run Primus in the Aussie paradigm. 
Otherwise, the company might be in jeopardy if he fights it.

Jan



Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

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