I think that the Government definitely needs to implement a wholesale-only National Broadband Network or break up Telstra, but I’m not yet convinced of the need to do both … and as it seems to be definitely going ahead with the NBN plan, I’m questioning the wisdom of the Telstra break-up — it seems heavy handed to me.

The only convincing argument I’ve heard so far is that because it will take the NBN Co many years to finalise its fibre rollout around Australia, that the break-up of Telstra will be needed to provide fair terms to the market in the short term.

However, with Telstra behaving in a lot more conciliatory way since David Thodey took over as CEO, I’m not sure of the need.

I’m not convinced from their rhetoric that the Opposition truly understands the issues though.

It will be v. interesting to see how this plays out in the Senate.

We totally forget about the small ISP’s such as the one I operated. We could only use Telstra Wholesale as a supplier and had to put up with paying more for wholesale services than Telstra retail. After many years the ACCC were able to legislate this by court action, by which time most ISP’s were put out of business having to compete against Telstra retail.

The only business model that Telstra is familiar with is where they operate as a monopoly. We got screwed over then, and they will screw over every one they can this time too.

In the long term, the best outcome will be a wholesale NBN that is not involved in any retail level operations.