Graham’s point is very interesting. There is wholesale wailing going on because Lucent, a French company, is buying the battered remains of Ma Bell’s old laboratory, and people are repeating the amazing list of its achievements. It was, of course, a private enterprise monopoly smashed up by the devotees of competition. I presume everyone did get cheaper telephony, but the scale of research depended on a huge organisation not hammered by cost pressures.

For a long time – a century really – Australia was a world leader in communications technology, precisely because of our distance problem. Our labs were among the best as well. Then of course we broke up the PMG.

I can’t debate whether that was the best thing to do, but it is wise to record the damage along with any improvements.

Thanks for info. Disagree about geography though – for example: Finland, Sweden, China (well, part of it anyway, the inland and western provinces ), all have to deal with huge distances.

fellow contributers:

My point was that the old integrated PMG, IF allowed to modernize, would have have been very well placed indeed to knock over all those problems without too many dramas and then deliver the world’s best service at a bargain price.

Static vs Dynamic IP Addresses. If you have a dynamic address, whenever you power off your ADSL router it looses it’s IP addr and will request a new one when you turn it back on. If you have static the IP addr never changes.

Anyone purchase a “static” IP address with their ADSL plan?

If you did consider this: ADSL is natively a static IP Addr technology. When Telstra first started selling it they were adding an extra bit of hardware that forced the IP Addr to change every so often… so they could sell you the “upgraded” static package. Other reasons for it of course, the main one being that if you have a static IP addr it’s hard for them to sell you webhosting services as well.

It’s a common bitch that it costs too much, often with the rider “compared to other western/industrialised nations”.

Guess what? You’re right! But there are reasons for it. The main reason is… (drum roll)… Australia is a bloody huge geographic area with a comparitivly tiny population density. Hence the cost of infrastructure per head of population is increased. Deal with it. Or increase the birthrate and/or immigration.

As for the “It’s slower too!” bitch – correct again… when it comes to DSL anyway. Without going into it too much it is basically due to the voltage that the Oz telephone network operates at. If we increase the voltage of the phone network we can vastly improve the datarate possible for DSL networks in Oz. And even then there would be other factors such as the capacity of our single(!) physical cable connection to the rest of the world (others are being built soon-ish).

Which is exactly John Quiggin’s point – you are in violent agreement with him. The only difference is that he judges we can’t get to full pregnancy from here, and so it’s better to abort. Abortion would mean going to the economics textbook model of nationalising the natural monopoly elements and fully privatising the rest.

This has the advantage of testing whether the natural monopoly position still holds – if not, Telstra’s copper wires will simply be bypassed by new technology. If so, we’ve made the best of a naturally bad position.

Broadband: Roughly, a network connection with a data throughput rate of at least 1 Megabit per second. That means that if you purchased a 512/128Mbps ADSL “Broadband” package you didn’t actually get broadband, you got fast narrowband.

Narrowband: slower than 1Mbps.

Bits vs Bytes: 8 bits = 1 byte, 1024 bits = 1 kilobit or kb, 1024kb = 1 megabit. Same goes for bytes – 1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte etc. Confusion reigns when marketing people get their hands on it and for some reason totally ignore or fail to understand how the binary nuymber system works and claim that 1000 bits/bytes = 1 kilobit/byte. Drives Data Comms people up the wall.

MODEM: Actually an acronym – MOdulator/DEModulator – converts an analogue signal to a digital signal and vice versa.

ADSL Modem – marketing term describing an ADSL Router, meant to avoid “confusion in the marketplace”… go figure. ADSL is already a digital signal, so no MODEM is required.

ADSL Router: Just like a normal router, but with 2 of its internal connections swapped over, and limited Network Adress Table configuration. If you’re any good with a soldering iron you can easily convert your ADSL router into a fully fledged router pretty easily.

ADSL Port: a multiplexor installed at the exchange to add the ADSL functionality. They cost a lot, and Telstra never asks you to cover the cost of it. From memory, the 1st batch of them Telsra purchased for the ADSL trials cost approx $10,000 per DSLAM multiplexor installed.

It also refers to content regulations, from C classifications to the requirements to broadcast Australian drama on prime time.

Without them, we would not have significant higher budget Australian programs on commercial television. Except for the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games.

BTW – do you realise that SBS has just snaffled the next two soccer world cups? According to them “Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the governing body of international football, has announced that it had awarded SBS the exclusive free-to-air & pay television and broadband internet rights for both the 2010 & 2014 FIFA World Cups in Australia.

The partnership will also mean SBS will manage the rights in the majority of Oceania, including New Zealand, in co-operation with FIFA.”

There’s an interesting bet on the future.

This half pregnant situation is exactly the worst possible position for telstra to be in.

The government is trying to off load all it’s bush committments onto Telstra, which means the shareholders. Think what would happen if they rebought the wires again! They can’t be trusted when the have other shareholders. What would they be doing if they owned the wires 100%. And that’s a Liberal government.

One of the problems is that government policy is in conflict with itself. They want to make Telstra a profitable company for shareholders, but at the same time want more competition and want to take market share away from it. Sounds like a recipe for a bugger’s muddle to me.

Also instead of being paranoic about the unions you should focus more on the quality of the company leadership, which, IMHO has been third rate under Siggy.

I’m not at all confident of Sol either. Recently in one of the Fairfax publications they had a good look at him and decided he was really outstanding at two things. One was in looking after himself. The other was in his timing of when to leave. As far as I can make out he is particularly bad at personnel leadership as far as the mass of workers are concerned. Like you he seems to see them as the enemy.

But enough of that. I really only came onto this thread to tell people about an article Dial-a-deal by Alan Jury in the mag FINANCIAL REVIEW smartinvestor (which is partly on the net, but not this article.) He says that:

According to global credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s, Telstra maintains one of the strongest market positions of its global peer group.

It is also planning to spend up to $27 billion over the next five years – $10 billion more than the past five years – to keep its operations at the leading edge of the industry. Telstra plans to build a new internet protocol core network, a new high-speed broadband network and a third generation mobile network, as well as streamlinming the company’s IT systems. Along the way, costs will be gouged out of the incumbent system, including reducing payroll by up to 12,000 people.

Jury continues:

It’s heady stuff, but necessary if Telstra is to stand up as a credible operator and as an even more plausible investment alternative. The risk is that chief executive Sol Trujillo’s team may stuff it up. (Emphasis added)

As things stand there does not seem to be any risk of ‘capital capture’. OTOH there is considerable risk of management incompetence. But there is also a considerable sovereign risk because the govt and the regulators may not allow him to generate the cash to rebuild the network. They may also not allow him to advance the services available to most of us too far ahead of our bush brethren.

When you have time make friends with Azureus. Drop me a line if you need a hand with introduction.

Secondly, the current federal government actively discourage unionisation among public employees.

Anyway, I have to leave this discussion now in order to respond to market signals by finishing an article for which I am being paid by the deadline in the contract

Should read

Heck they screwed GM…..

Yea, right!

“I think the onus is on you to demonstrate how we have a competitive telecommunications market at the moment, since the level of ACCC intervention tends to suggest we don’t.”

No it doesn’t. It means the regulator is ever vigilent in an area that needs close polic e work. That’s all. In other words, where Telstra is a monoply the regulator needs to wastch very closely that it isn’t up to any tricks.

This is what happens in the US as well.

It’s not up to me to demonstrate anything. It is up to those who favour renationalization to prove the wires wouldn’t become a playting for the union movement.

Heck they fucked. Why wouldn’t they fuck the Australian public, again?

I think the onus is on you to demonstrate how we have a competitive telecommunications market at the moment, since the level of ACCC intervention tends to suggest we don’t.

It is sheer nonsense to believe that comptetition could only work if the government owned the network. This is just shoddy second rate thinking.

The US FCA does a great job of policing not just one telco by all the Babay Bells to see that they behave. That’s what other countries ahve done as well. Even Germany, where Deuthsche Telecom is private.

In point of fact it would be far better that the wires are privately owned under close supervsions. That way at least shareholders would go some way to make sure the unions don’t go a thieving rampage when the think they can.

It works elsewhere, so you need to prove it is not working to convince a lot of people. Otherwise I just take it that the debate is really about getting the stinking unions back onto a no lose win win game again.

Not true because no one has said you can’t use the roads. It’s abad example.