Beyond 2000: A Broadband Crisis Point
Beyond 2000: A Broadband Crisis Point
April 12, 2007: Australia’s broadband situation has hit a crisis point. With both sides of politics making their election promises, when will Australia finally regain its status as a world leader in telecommunications?
According to David Kennedy, Ovum research director for broadband and wireline research, Australia’s world leading telecommunications regime has come to an end. While it emerged unscathed after the 1997 reforms and brought us safely into an Internet controlled world until around the year 2000, a significant shake-up is required to ensure world-class access speeds.
In this election year, both sides of politics have been sure to push the broadband agenda, but Kennedy believes without industry participation, taxpayer dollars could well go to waste.
“What concerns me is that these policies have been introduced in an ad hoc manner over the last two years or so,” he says. “It’s a little unsettling to the market that both sides of politics appear to be having these discussions behind closed doors.”
As Australia looks to make significant investments in telecommunications infrastructure, Kennedy urges the government to consider the needs for industry participation. He refers to the 1997 reforms, when Senator Richard Alston, then Minister for Communications and the Arts opened infrastructure competition to all comers and encouraged lobbying and debate from interested parties.
“In 1997, there really was an open and transparent process, everyone understood what needed to be regulated,” he says. “This ad hoc policy decision making has unsettled the market and raised uncertainty. The way to fix that, is to have an open and frank discussion.”
Kennedy believes we are facing a paradigm shift on telecommunications that could go either way. While the 1997 reforms were in place to encourage competition, the government’s ‘hands-off’ approach was openly abandoned in 2005. Now, as significant investment is essential to build up Australia’s infrastructure.
“I don’t have a problem with either government spending on structural policies,” says Kennedy. “But I can’t help worrying when a significant bipartisan policy shift happens without open consultation, without a base of economic and policy analysis to support it and without clear criteria established for policy intervention,” Kennedy wrote in a paper on the issue.
With the increased uptake of Web 2.0 technologies, Kennedy pushes the fact that a ‘next-generation’ required to support these initiatives needs a ‘next-generation policy framework.
“Both sides of politics still have the policy wiggle-room needed for a systematic policy rethink,” he says. “Australia once has a ‘world lading telecommunications regime.’ It can have one again.”