[AusNOG] Fibre run between Buildings

[Mark Newton]

On Oct 16, 2014, at 2:08 PM, Mark Newton <newton at atdot.dotat.org> wrote:

> We have laws pertaining to licensed carriers. What purposes are those laws supposed to be serving, are the purposes legitimate, are the laws actually serving them in practice, and are there any less-impactful laws which could serve them at least as well?

Following some offline discussion:

The original purpose of carrier licensing laws was to enable the government to control the rate at which competition was introduced to the Australian telco marketplace.

Previously, the only company permitted to provide telco services was Telecom/Telstra.

When the Government commenced the re-regulation* process, they rewrote the Telecommunications Act so that anyone with a carrier license could provide telco services.  Initially the only carrier license in existence was the one held by Telstra, so the initial state of the new law was essentially the same as what was previously in existence.

Then the Government auctioned carrier licenses to Optus (if and only if they were granted a deed to Aussat) and Vodafone (which almost pulled out at the last minute due to concerns over competition, and was only convinced to remain in the game at the last minute when the Government said they’d force Telstra to close down the AMPS mobile phone network).

A significant amount of time passed before they started offering carrier licenses to other organizations.

The Government has used licensing as a place to hang a bunch of other stuff (e.g., USO payments, Telecommunications Interception requirements, etc;  Telstra also uses the lack of a license as an excuse to decline to engage with someone on a wholesale basis).  But there’s no specific reason why they can’t be achieved differently, like they are in virtually every other advanced Western economy.

But the use of licenses to prevent the “premature” entry of new market players is clearly obsolete.

So why do Australians still need licenses before they can install cables?  Does this legislative prevention from entering a market continue to serve a useful purpose?

   - mark


[*] they called it de-regulation, but we all know how that turned out

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