Which Country’s the Broadband Disgrace Now, Mr Trujillo?

Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo’s latest unsolicited advice to the US Government appears to fly in the face of the claims he has made to support his unrelenting campaign against regulation in Australia.

Telstra seems to have a different story about the relative broadband success of the US in Australia to the story it tells in the US itself.

Since 2005, Telstra has repeatedly claimed Australia’s broadband ranking was international “disgrace” and demanded of successive Federal Governments that they dump pro-competition regulation and give Telstra a multi-billion dollar hand out.

Mr Trujillo and his management team said Australia should follow the path of the US, where regulation to protect competition was radically stripped away from the time the Bush administration took office in 2000.

Now, in an article in BusinessWeek online, Mr Trujillo is advising the in coming Obama administration that the US “desperately needs to catch up to” broadband developments in Europe, Japan, South Korea – and Australia!

At least his recipe for the US Government is familiar – he asks for multi billion dollars in hand outs from tax payers with “the right regulatory settings”, which Australians will recognize as Telstra code for “no competition strings attached, please”.

But the truth is that Europe, Japan, South Korea have stolen a march on the US in broadband because they increased pro-competition regulation over the past decade while the US did the opposite.

The pro-competition reforms have allowed competitors in those countries to access monopoly access network elements at reasonable prices, and seen broadband speeds and usage grow rapidly.

In the US, the laws allowing similar access have been wound back or removed, and the US has slid down international broadband rankings.

The Australian Government has refused to hand Telstra a blank cheque and open slather to exploit its market power to kill competition, the result of which is that Telstra has clearly lost interest in participating in the process in Australia toward building new fixed line broadband networks and left it to others to plan for the future.

Perhaps governments around the world should give Mr Trujillo some of his own advice back when he asks for subsidies and regulatory free kicks – we’ve seen this movie before Sol, and we know how it ends.

Contact:

David Forman

Executive Director

CCC Inc

0438121114