RS,

"Are you claiming competition was banned to build the NBN? As far as I know it wasn't. Nothing has changed. Whatever the status quo was - it remains"

Sorry no. The status is not Quo.

Just read this.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/nbn-laws-anti-competitive-says-aapt-chief-paul-broad/story-e6frg8zx-1226030989662

If the Coalition reverses these laws, the NBN collapses.

also

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/accc-concerned-at-telstras-agreement-not-to-promote-wireless-as-a-substitute-for-the-nbn/story-e6frgakx-1226125493744

"Among issues worrying the ACCC is an agreement that will prevent Telstra from actively promoting wireless services as an alternative to the NBN network - a measure critics claim is an attempt to stifle competition and prop up the NBN business model."

@Shadow Minsister: If the Coalition reverses these laws, the NBN collapses.

From the article:

"Mr Broad said NBN Co's commitment to a uniform wholesale price across the $36 billion fibre network was inefficient"

And of course he is right. The NBN Co could make far more money if they were allowed to cherry pick their prices. How you could think it would do the reverse and send the NBN broke is beyond me.

@Shadow Minister: The status is not Quo.

Yes, it is. In fact, it is preserving it. The Universal Service Obligation is being transferred from Telstra to the NBN, as it should be. The retail arm of Telstra is now free to complete in all other areas it operates in (mobile wireless, back haul) without restriction. This is a good thing. The one downside is I suspect over time many outback towns will loose their mobile coverage, which Telstra up till now obliged to provide.

The USO is inefficient, but it is actually a Coalition thing. It's beloved by the Nationals, as it is the only way their constituents get a phone service.

@Shadow Minister: an agreement that will prevent Telstra from actively promoting wireless services as an alternative to the NBN network

Yep. But notice this is _not_ a law. It is a clause in a commercial agreement between NBN Co and Telstra. Everyone else is free to compete with the NBN using mobile wireless. This happens to be exactly the situation I painted in my previous post.

And of course they didn't quote the entire ACCC comment. Here is another relevant bit:

"The ACCC notes in its paper that Telstra has indicated the wireless restrictions are only a very limited constraint on its operations, and that it intends to continue to provide wireless services as complementary to fixed line services, even in an NBN world."
http://delimiter.com.au/2011/08/30/wireless-nbn-clause-could-harm-competition-accc/

For what is worth, the restriction is Telstra can't advertise wireless as a replacement for fixed line. It isn't a restriction on what they can sell. In other words Shadow: you are making a mountain out of a mole hill.

By the way, I in doing yet more reading in researching for for the post above, I came across this:

http://delimiter.com.au/2011/08/30/fix-your-separation-plan-accc-tells-telstra/

The thing I wanted to point out is the amount of work the privatising of a monopoly creates. This was driven home to me many years ago, back in the era of the Howard government, when I learnt that there were two court rooms in Canberra devoted full time to doing one thing: arbitrating between ACCC and Telstra.

Telstra, being a privatised company, was doing it's damnedest to bleed us all dry. (At is should - it is the remit of a private company is to make as much money as possible.) I don't know whether the Howard government anticipated this, but nonetheless they had to create a department with a phalanx of lawyers to rein in the monster they created. I have never been able to find the reference again, but the above link paints the picture:

"Telstra doesn’t hire whole floors of lawyers from law firms like Mallesons Stephen Jaques (from what we hear, it has been more akin to an army at some points) to naively and honestly create ACCC submissions which run along the lines of what the regulator and its rivals want. After several decades of forced negotiation at arm’s length through the ACCC, Telstra’s used to this process."

The end result was the government made the final determination on Telstra's wholesale prices, but rather than just setting it they had to go through a horribly inefficient and time consuming process. All that disappears when ownership reverts back the the government, as it will with the NBN.

And so back to your original point. You seem to be claiming the NBN is shutting down competition, and introducing government mandated pricing. But there was no land line competition, and the government sets the prices now. And worse no one - not even you, has come up with a way to introduce competition. Not once. You just was to preserve the status quo - a private monopoly. Ick.

Oh, and one more thing. We seem to have had our fill of the radio discussion, but this might interest you. In the other NBN thread started by csteele, I tried to explain that what limits wireless is the amount of CPU power you can throw at the problem - not traditional things like amps and antenna design.

This link has a graphic (titled "Modem relative performance") that illustrates the point rather well:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/20/microprocessors_may_face_trouble_ahead/

Note that 3.9G / LTE is what we (well at least Telstra and the NBN) are rolling out now. True 4G / LTE Advanced remains a glint is some engineers eye. Given that the first crop mobile phones that implement LTE get so hot they become uncomfortable to hold, it gives you an idea of what the problems the leap from 3.9G to 4G will entail - if it happens at all.

Why it may not happen at all is explained in the next page on that article. Look at the grapic titled "Fabs: not as popular as they used to be" here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/20/microprocessors_may_face_trouble_ahead/page2.html

That graph looks exactly like my professor's at Uni foreshadowed some (embarrassingly many) decades ago, when they explained what the end of the Moore's Law era would look like. Their point revolved around a simple correlation: as the semiconductor feature size decreases, the cost of building a plant to manufacturer it increases exponentially. As the cost goes up, fewer and fewer players are able to get the capital to build a new foundry. At some point the number of competitors drops so low that there isn't enough competition to drive the 2 year cycle building of a new foundries, and you end up with a oligopoly that no longer has to innovate to survive. And so ends Moore's law.

As you can see from that graph, there are now 5 companies still in the game. The next feature sizes are 15nm, and 10nm. 10nm is looking iffy, but 10nm is probably where we need to be at for a viable 4G modem.

Rstuart,

"And of course he is right. The NBN Co could make far more money if they were allowed to cherry pick their prices. How you could think it would do the reverse and send the NBN broke is beyond me."

In your comment you confirm that smaller companies can provide services far cheaper than the NBN. But it goes further than this. The so called anti cherry picking legislation goes far further than anti cherry picking, it allows an alternative network to be built only if it services everyone (ie an second NBN) which effectively bans all other fixed line installations, and all competition whether cherry picking or otherwise, and irrespective of whether they can provide better or lower cost systems, or even for a different purpose.

The government intends to pay both telstra and optus to decommission their networks and refrain from advertising the wireless as an alternative to the NBN. Considering that these two companies supply about 70% of the internet this is a pretty big anti competition push.

The advertising is a broad brush ban and is a legally enforceable contract. No advertising means no promotions, web information, sales people etc. While theoretically possible to sell wireless internet as an alternative, it is impractical.

The NBN is putting the competition in networking back decades.