[AusNOG] FTTH - Dreaming?

[lists]

Hi All

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Damien Coxall" <klownism at gmail.com>

> 1. Curtis, congratulations on having the balls to stand up and say
> something (at least somewhat) positive about Telstra.

The discussion/ topic is not about Telstra.  It is about whether the 
deployment of fibre to the home is a dream.  As I said twice,  the issues 
that needs to be addressed are the regulations that would allow innovative 
telcos to be able to ensure that a much larger telco with deep pockets 
doesn't use its resources to stiffle competition.  I also gave an example or 
2.   It is a pity that every time the issue of the structural reforms that 
may be needed to allow for the deployment of infrastructure such as FTTH we 
get replies like the one above.  It doesn't address the issue.  Personally I 
think the subject line should be changed, if the topic is to be changed to 
"lets stick up for telstra"

>
> 2. I love how everyone is so happy to go on about Telstra's massive
> profits and government subsidies but conveniently ignores how much they
> give back (even if it's not by choice)

Please don't insult the rest of the industry.  The whole industry gives back 
in one form or another.  Many do it without advertising it.  As for my 
comments, if you read them,  I was pointing out that Telstra like others was 
receiving subsidies to clarify the comments that had been made previously
ie
>> Dear reporters: Telstra is here, they're the reason a number of rural
>> Australians have access to DSL/ISDN where it would never have been
>> profitable to do so.


>
> Scott so kindly pointed out the link to the financial results, here's
> what I found with a quick scan thru.
>
> Telstra has payed out a 14c dividend for the last 2 years, IIRC the gov.
> still owns just under 50% or thereabouts,
>  making a dividend of around
> $3B, add to that the $1.4B or so they payed in taxes last year and we're
> looking at nearly 4.5 Billy per year over the last 2 years.*
>
> Anyone wanna run the numbers on how much the gov. made while Telstra was
> still a government dept. with a proper monopoly? I'm willing to wager
> that it would dwarf the figures above (taking into account inflation and
> the like)

All totally irrelavent to the topic


> All that and we want to sit here and complain about a measley $800 mill
> over several years, c'mon guys, lets get real.

It was a statement to balance the following

>> Telstra is here, they're the reason a number of rural
>> Australians have access to DSL/ISDN where it would never have been
>> profitable to do so.

Now "lets get real" Telstra didn't and doesn't carry all the load for this. 
There are subsidies and USO payments and very rarely do the companies that 
pay the USO payments that end up at Telstra get recognised.  Telstra would 
have everyone think they do it out of the goodness of their heart, and some 
poor souls believe it.


> Anywho, that's just my 2.5c, take of it what you will (for the record, I
> don't love Telstra,

If I didn't know better, I would say you are on the Telstra payroll from the 
comments above

>  I just don't feel that they are entirely evil).

No they are not evil.  They are just very well balance sheet resourced and 
they use those resources to stop competition getting established which is 
what the reply was about.   Do some research on the optus cable roll out, 
and what happened, then go and do a business case to deploy and go to a 
financial backer.  If you haven't got a water tight way of defending your 
business from the same risks that were made evident in the optus rollout, 
they will laugh you out of the place.  So far I don't believe anyone has 
identified a way to overcome thise issues and so far no additional broad 
scale infrastructure has been rolled out.   This is the issue

>
> * Please don't pick at my maths, I'm coming off the back of a long night
> of dealing with a big Optus outage and should be in bed, not reading
> AusNOG posts.

We all do that and all carriers have outages.


Regards

Tim