Forwarded with permission. Any comments?
-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Breaking Up Telstra (and Optus etc.) Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2015 10:57:25 +1100 From: Malcolm Moore <[email protected]> Hi David Breaking Up Telstra Having worked in the PMG / Telecom Australia / Telstra for over 30 years and being in the telecomms industry for over 45 years in a very wide number of Technical, Engineering and Commercial roles; I have a very detailed historical knowledge of the entire telecomms business and the associated infrastructures. Before the introduction and wide adaption of silicon-based technologies, the PMG / Telecom Australia was primarily an analogue-based infrastructure business with very high technical and engineering overheads and a very small range of retail products.(The Plain Old Telephone Service (*POTS*) comes to mind. After the very wide adaption of silicon-based technologies, Telecom Australia / Telstra (and all the associated "competing telecomms businesses") now have extremely low technical and engineering overheads and a large range of commercial retail products and services. Put simply, it was *not privatisation* that made these telecomms business "efficient" it was purely the sequential *advances in silicon-based technologies* and the *development of software-based technologies* that made the telecommunications infrastructure very inexpensive to manufacture extremely inexpensive to maintain, and concurrently produced a wide range of new commercial telecommunications-based *retail products and services*. The *competitive Retail Reselling* of what is now very inexpensive telecommunications infrastructure-based communications products and services makes the telecommunications businesses (Telstra / Optus etc.) look to be very highly efficient for all the wrong reasons. With this diametrical change in business focus, the control of successive telecomms infrastructure rollouts shifted from the Engineers who knew and understood the overall telecomms infrastructure to the (Retail) Sales and Marketing executives who have a very limited knowledge of the infrastructure.Concurrently, the focus of infrastructure builds has moved to much shorter (sales-based) timeframes and localised to where the short-term ROI is maximised (for "maximised Shareholder value"). The Davidson Report (1982) created a telecommunications sector on the ASX to significantly broaden the investment base outside then mining, banking and insurance sectors, then proceeded to break up what was an extremely efficient telecommunications infrastructure commission into one of the worst possible economic scenarios: Privatised Competing Infrastructures. From about 1995 the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) started to be flooded with intractable service / billing complaints and since then there have been over 15 Select Senate Inquiries and Regional Inquiries (virtually one every second year) to report on, but not identify the causes of, the sharply declining state of telecommunications infrastructure in Australia. Since then successive Federal Governments introduced several very ill-considered short-term (private sector favouring) "initiatives" and all of these were naturally failures because none of these "initiatives" were "infrastructure business" focused. Essentially, the privatisation and splitting up of the highly efficient one "economy of scale" telecommunications infrastructure business has created an economic nightmare of monstrous proportions for successive Australian Governments, and this telecommunications infrastructure wreckage that is now seriously crippling non-metropolitan Australian business and life standards. The current NBN (version 5) is an open admission that breaking up the Australian telecomms infrastructure was fundamentally flawed, and throwing in of over $50 Bn into the NBN from the Federal Government(s) is proving to be highly uneconomic because the NBN was essentially a rather flawed academic strategy instead of a well-considered engineering strategy. Infrastructure is virtually everything that is not Retail Reselling (all the exchange sites, switches, transmission equipment, racks frames, A/C, power, batteries, control support networks, cable conduits, pits, sputniks, radio base stations, towers, radio systems, satellite, earth base stations, Network Construction and Design, tractors, O/F trenching machinery etc etc – all of this (and more) is infrastructure- none of this is Retail Reselling (shops, exec offices, etc). This split is really straightforward. The merging of the ex-Telstra , Ex-Optus and NBN telecomms infrastructures into one "economy of scale" infrastructure business" (with an Infrastructure Business mindset) will quickly provide a massive internal saving because the overheads of inter-business leasing will immediately stop, floor-space in all exchange sites will become readily available and Engineers can plan and lead the building of the telecommunications network without short-term interference. This "infrastructure business" mindset will in turn provide less expensive Wholesale prices, which will in return provide increased profits to the Retail Resellers.So the sale price of handing over the Telecomms infrastructure is ZERO. The split is extremely simple: Retail Reselling / Marketing - - - - Infrastructure That’s it. Can be done in about 10 working days from top to bottom. Regards Malcolm Moore JP BE(Elect.) [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> 02 9440 0541 _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
