I think the issue with the provision of equitable country services is that, perhaps they SHOULD expect to pay more, but what will invariably happen is they they will end up being subsidised by the taxpayer.

Thus we will go from a self-funded public system to a private quasi-monopoly that will be underwritten by the taxpayer forever, long after the T1,T2 and T3 dollars are spent.
To make it worse, we already have over 4% of GDP leaving the country as dividends to overseas owners so there will be even less money around to play with.

It's no use looking overseas for a solution to this because despite the Governments initial arguments about Australia having one of the few Telco's in 100% government hands, what they neglected to say was that all but a few are still part-owned by their governments.

I have recently put my future for ADSL into Telstra's new 3G network.
I am yet to have the device delivered. I am at the moment connected thru ISDN which recently is disconecting every minute, they're working on it.
I was told by the tele marketing man that I could receive comfortably in the geography where I live, CDMA is hardly available. I was also told that I could look forward to using it as a desktop modem only available at the moment to laptops.
If it all works it will be a wonder, of course I can expect cost to soar, but the promotion gives me a new handset and a fair deal on 20cent calls.
The promo does't say the present cost will remain, and I expect to oneday pay a lot more for the service, meantime we hope.
fluff

City people are quite strange, especially when they blabber on about how country people shouldn't expect the same level of services as city people and make it out (without explicity saying) that the country people are leeching off the city.

It's the other way around. 2/3 of our country's wealth that is created still comes from agriculture and mining... from country areas. The cities simply re-cycle this wealth (for the most part)through our services industries. If anything the city people are mooching off the country.

Privatization of our telecommunications monopoly in country as sparsely populated and as large as our was always an economists wet-dream.

People seem to think that if services dissapear from the bush (which it will), this is some sort of maret failure. It isn't. Providing services in such areas is not profitable, so services will not be provided there, thats the market working fine. It is however a moral failure.

We have seen this time and time again in other countries with such tales as the disasterous water privatizations (Bolivia,Argentina,South Africa etc). People who couldn't afford water had to drink contaminated water from other sources (poluted rivers etc.) and got sick and died. People who could, bought clean water and lived. Private water companies made a profit. The "Free Market" showed that private water comapanies were more "efficient" because they made profits. Moral failure.

We should move away from the cult of the free market. The free market is great, but isn't the solution to every problem.