In this lengthy discussion of the “National Broadband Network”, it was generally assumed that the existing copper network had essentially reached its speed limit, and that it could never provide the kind of internet performance that Australians will want in the medium-term future, necessitating the construction of the “Rolls-Royce” fibre-to-the-premises solution announced by Kevin Rudd a couple of days ago. But are these two assumptions correct?
Most Australians with “broadband internet access” at home use ADSL. This technology essentially uses your old phone line to send high-speed data. The latest incarnation, which these days most Australians have access to after Telstra finally turned it on a couple of years ago (after deliberately leaving it dormant in their exchanges for some time) is ADSL 2+, which tops out at 24 Mbit/s under ideal conditions. That is, an ADSL 2+modem can carry about 3 megabytes of data per second. That’s the rough equivalent of three books’ worth of text per second, or or a three-minute pop song in MP3 format. Theoretically, it’s enough to stream live about 1.5 HDTV channels, or, if you like, one HDTV and one SDTV channel. The practical capacity is somewhat lower; something closer to one HDTV channel is probably the practical limit of ADSL2+ under good conditions.
But is that the limit of what the copper network, with a few upgrades, might realistically provide? In a word, no.
Continue reading ‘Is the existing copper network at its speed limit?’
The government’s announced that it’s given up on the original form of its national broadband network scheme, and is now proposing “a new public/private company to build a national network”. They’ve also taken a significant step up in the proposed technology, basing it on “fibre to the home” covering 90% of the population, with the remainder to be covered through wireless and satellite technology.
There’s a discussion paper here on the regulatory reforms that might be necessary.
My initial take is that this might just undo the historic stuff-up of creating and then selling, intact, the Telstra behemoth – a stuff-up that involved both the Hawke-Keating and the Howard governments. Then again, if takeup of wireless broadband continues at its present rate, it might be Australia’s biggest-ever white elephant.
ELSEWHERE: Paul Budde at New Matilda likes the announcement, noting the implications for e-health, amongst other things. The Whirlpool forums are running overtime, and seem mostly enthused. Joshua Gans “fell off his chair in delight”.
Update: [by Mark] A round up of blog reaction at Polliegraph and Swinburne academic Jock Given has an interesting historical perspective at Inside Story.
Telstra has been playing a high-risk strategy over tendering for the National Broadband Network, submitting a deliberate non-compliant tender which the government has now confirmed excludes it from the process. The brinkmansip game appears to have failed at the first hurdle, though the implication is that the government should reshape the tender process to its parameters after other bids are considered or face years of litigation. The inducement to the government to play the game Telstra’s way is the inevitable further delay of the construction of the NBN.
The share market hasn’t received Telstra’s strategy benignly, though, to understate the point, with 12% of its market value being wiped out yesterday.
But Telstra has one friend – “free market” thinktank the IPA. IPA Research Fellow Chris Berg writes:
Governments are going to have to step back from micro-managing the telecommunications sector. Market forces need to determine the shape of such a quickly developing industry, not regulators.
Apparently that translates into support for a quasi-monopoly keen to destroy its competitors, avoid structural separation and gouge its customers. Intriguing.
Elsewhere: Gary Sauer-Thompson and Paul Budde in New Matilda.
Update: Bernard Keane in Crikey.
Update: Peter Martin on Telstra’s “war on everything”.
Earlier in the year, writing in On Line Opinion, I thought that Labor’s “Forward With Fairness” industrial relations policy was best interpreted as an attempt to entrench a new workplace settlement acceptable to all parties – and I still think that’s the Rudd government’s main game. However, it’s now becoming clearer that an element of union bashing is involved – the tired old Third Way game of establishing supposedly electorally popular distance from teh evil labour movement, and also that the “balance” being struck is tilted quite significantly in the direction of employers. Among other things, this explains the dissent in the ranks of unions toward the lacklustre public performance in holding Labor accountable from Sharan Burrow and Jeff Lawrence. It’s also becoming clearer – with the resurrection of demands for “statutory individual contracts” by Julie Bishop as a condition of Senate passage – that the model hasn’t succeeded in producing consensus.
Julia Gillard outlined the results of consultations and more of the shape of the policy which will be embodied in legislation soon to be introduced into Parliament in an address to the National Press Club yesterday. The transcript is here. Commentary is largely focused on the unfair dismissal changes for small business, and there’s a sample of the reaction in a good article summarising union and academic views in The Age. But equally important are the machinations going on in the Industrial Relations Commission over “modern awards”, where employers have been presenting what are basically award-stripping ambit claims, and some odd interventions from Gillard herself [the process was examined in a previous LP post by Senator Rachel Siewert of The Greens] and the rather weak protections for collective bargaining that have been outlined.
It’s all very well to say that Fair Work Australia will be able to make good faith bargaining orders, but if they’re only weakly enforceable, and if there’s no power to arbitrate in the face of, well, bad faith, then it seems somewhat of a fig leaf. The ongoing legal maneouvring Telstra have engaged in, which has just had a setback with employees rejecting a non-union collective agreement in a Commission ordered ballot, is a case in point. Differential pay offers (which have nothing to do with rewarding merit and performance and everything to do with de-unionisation), legal stalling, failure to recognise bargaining agents and “wait them out” negotiating are all weapons in the armoury of management strategy, and it’s far from clear from what Gillard had to say that these tactics couldn’t be employed by business under the new laws.
Continue reading ‘Julia Gillard and the unions’
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