How stupid is this, really?

[excal]

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,24314822-15306,00.html

In the event Telstra failed in its bid to secure up to $4.7 billion in taxpayer funding to build the NBN, the telco planned to spend its cash on expanding its high-speed broadband networks in Australia's capital cities, chief executive Sol Trujillo told Reuters last week. He also said he would look at buying communications assets in the Asia-Pacific if it failed to secure the NBN contract.

But if a Telstra failure leads to a successful bid from Terria, Australia's dominant telco could find itself barred from competing with NBN infrastructure.

"Our proposition to the Government is that no party be allowed to expand the network and operate in competition to the national broadband network," Terria bid manager Michael Simmons said.

"Because of Australia's size and population this network must be a monopoly and must be structurally separated. If you don't have a structurally separated monopoly network where access prices are regulated, it will not be viable.

"So you must preclude any alternative broadband network."

Terria is forging ahead in the lead-up to the November 26 submissions deadline for the NBN. It has already finalised its network build and is now in the final stages of shortlisting a panel of technology partners and equipment suppliers for the project's rollout.

"We have got our network build finalised. Now we are at the phase where we go to market to identify the people who can build it for us," Mr Simmons said.

Last week Terria briefed a panel of 30 equipment and technology suppliers, made up of civil contractors, network equipment vendors and existing technology partners, on the consortium's high-level network design.

The parties are now expected to lodge expressions of interest with Terria to convince it of their capability in building and maintaining the NBN.

"Once we receive the expressions of interest we will then fine-tune potential parties into a panel of providers that will ultimately build the network for us," Mr Simmons said.

"We're not looking at aligning ourselves with one equipment supplier on an exclusive basis, as Telstra has done. We think a competitive panel of providers is essential to get the best outcome and to build the network across the whole of the nation in a timely manner."

While Terria has drawn up a shortlist of preferred suppliers, the consortium was not willing to make it public.

The consortium expects to have its panel of suppliers finalised by the end of September.

"By the end of September we will have a group of parties that will form the nucleus of our suppliers and technology partners," Mr Simmons said.

"This will enable us to work with them through the month of October on our design and iron out any problems with our solution."

Terria is planning to run live trials of its network build in front of the Communications Minister's NBN panel of experts before the submissions deadline at the end of November.

I'm surprised the word 'anti-competitive' hasn't been mentioned yet.

[Eriny]

There are sometimes going to be natural monopolies in cases where the duplication of infrastructure would just be costly and inefficient.

[excal]

The problem is, this isn't natural. Someone's asking the government to 'preclude any alternative network'.