Harvard Townhall, Aussie Style

Remember the town hall at Harvard a few weeks back? Yeah that one that Comcast packed the house with and made a fool of themselves at the same time. Well our Australian cohorts had something similar. Theirs was between the CEO of Telestra, ACCC, an ISP and Conroy the ‘Internet’ PM. From all accounts it appears quite entertaining –

“It’s going to be a hell of a debate in a few minutes,” Primus CEO Rhavi Bhatia predicted. But in the end, a public confrontation between Telstra, the ACCC and the Minister for Broadband produced more amusing sniping than real fireworks.

At a session entitled ‘The Broadband Impasse’ at the New Agenda For Prosperity conference in Melbourne, many of the speakers stuck to familiar ground. Telstra chairman Donald McGauchie ripped into the ACCC and anyone who dared to disagree with him, while subtly overstating available network speeds. ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel noted the “chilling effect” Telstra potentially had on the rest of the industry but refused to rise to the bait of questions about current regulatory regimes. Minister for Broadband Senator Stephen Conroy promised that details of the National Broadband Network (NBN) would be available “soon” but admitted it could take more than five years to build. And Bhatia argued that the NBN would only work if it was comprehensively separated from existing operators, a concept McGauchie loudly dismissed as “utterly preposterous”.

at one point it was noted –

First speaker off the rank was Conroy, who wasted no time reminding everybody just why we’d reached a poisonous broadband impasse in the first place. “Over the past 11 years, there have been 18 different broadband plans proposed, yet our international performance has continued to slip.”

The observation to be made out of all this is that the experience of the US is not unique in the 1st World sense. Australia is facing some of the same corporate entrancement, resistance to change, unwillingness to capitalize as we here in the States are experiencing. But it has become abundantly clear that legacy carriers are an impediment to change not a agent thereto.

APC has the full monty here.