@*elizabeths-mum* wrote:
You are a cruel and heartless person am3. 😛
I thought Clair wrote that when I first read it.
Sorry to shatter your illusions about the O telecom. I still have my mobile with them and they give me some discounts occasionally for being a long time customer, so they aren't all bad.
4. Yes I do know what Chanel No 5 smells like but prefer Madame Rochas or Caleche (by Hermes)
Bump, I adore Caleche.
Many years ago (30 to be precise) I won a trip to London - business class with Cathey pacific - in a poetry competition. They upgraded us to first class for the Perth/Hongkon leg each way and we received Caleche perfume and hand lotion in our complimentary toilet bags. I fell in love with it and vowed never to use anythig else, but I could only afford it when I could get t it duty free - and now I have been told they are no longer making it. 
Where are the competition models?
It’s easy to shout ‘competition’ from a great political or academic height, but it’s much more difficult to give it a serious commercial foundation. Perhaps this is why those advocating this level of competition do not come up with ideas or suggestions to show how it could work.
If we follow an open infrastructure competition policy we will have to find another solution for the other 50 per cent of the population – assuming that both Professor Hilmer and Minister Turnbull agree that broadband access has to be a universal service.
In the future more essential services such as healthcare, education, government services, smart energy services and business services will be delivered over that infrastructure, with the assistance of cloud computing, M2M and Big Data, to everybody in the country – this cannot just be given to the 50 per cent who will be serviced by the commercial models.
Furthermore they will have to come up with good reasons for investors to invest – beyond cherry-picking – in competing fixed line infrastructure, as current HFC and copper infrastructure will all eventually end up in vanilla fibre networks, with no economically-viable business model for two or more of those competing FttP networks.
So far there are no investors chasing investment models based on a level of infrastructure competition such as this.
In all reality the final outcome of fixed line telecoms will be FttP, and that will be a utility – be it in five, 10 or 20 years. Investors base their fixed infrastructure plans on 20- to 30-year investment cycles and will therefore be wary of these developments, as they can very easily ruin their investment.
Competition policy should be focused on the services, not the infrastructure
But to those advocating competition, the real value – rather than the political or dogmatic value – is that for those using it the infrastructure itself is not important. They are interested in the services that are delivered over it, and this is where competition policies should be focused.
Now, it can be argued that infrastructure development can be done differently – not through cross-subsidies. I have no issue with that but if community leaders argue for infrastructure-based competition they will, at the same time, have to indicate:
So far – as with all other infrastructure in this country, whether electricity, water, roads, hospitals or schools – we use cross-subsidy models to provide a universal service.
It's easy to argue for infrastructure-based competition, but it is not as easy to turn that into a social economic policy. Ignoring the other half of the country where this level of infrastructure competition will not work without addressing the perilous investment issues that are involved in such a competition model.
This is an edited version of a post originally published on October 8. Paul Budde is the managing director of BuddeComm, an independent telecommunications research and consultancy company, which includes 45 national and international researchers in 15 countries.