My stopover is Sydney was frustratingly short. I'm now sitting in Sydney Airport waiting for my flight to Auckland where, hopefully, I'll have a little more time to get a feel for the city, if not the country.
Last night I had dinner with the irreplaceable Paul Budde who is as sharp and knowledgeable as he is nice, and that's saying something (the view over the harbour, the stunningly tasty fish and the Tasmanian wine didn't hurt my enjoyment of the evening either!) Today I had some more business oriented meetings which complemented and balanced the vision that he shared with me last night on Australian telecoms nicely.
Essentially, this has led my thoughts to dwell on the economics of FTTN. A few weeks back, one of my trusted readers pointed me to evidence that FTTN unbundling was economically unsound, and I have yet to dwelve into the source to make my own opinion, but I'm increasingly thinking that it's most likely right, and not just in the specific case he pointed me to. Which leads to a paradox about the Australian NBN process: if it is FTTN that gets deployed (as seems highly likely) and if it is supposed to be open access, then how can that possibly work?
Another snippet of information (or rumour?) I heard is that one of the NBN bidding parties is lobbying for the NBN to be a regulated monopoly, therefore forbidding any third party from deploying their own next-generation infrastructure. That seems like a pretty crazy position to me, and I hope for the sake of the Australians that the government doesn't agree to this. I can see the fear there: if Telstra deploys its own NGAN and competes, then the winning consortium would have a harder time acquiring customers.
But on the other hand, if any player was willing to deploy, locally or nationally, using their own money (and not government subsidies), how could that be forbidden
