Lib's broadband plan 'troubling': McGeoch
At the opening of the SAS Forum held at Sydney's Hilton Hotel today, Telecom NZ director Rod McGeoch joined other industry representatives in criticising the Coalition's broadband policy, saying he found the minimum 12Mbps speed "troubling" for future growth in Australia.
"I just cannot believe, and I don't want to get in political debate, that we could have settled in the Opposition for 12Mbps outcome," McGeoch told the forum. "I've been told by my board for two years that if we're going to video streaming into the house, the answer is between 15 and 20Mbps."
"So where did 12 come from? That really troubled me to see that yesterday as a goal."
Bank of Queensland CEO David Liddy agreed with this sentiment.
"We need to come up with a solution that's going to be a solution not something that's only going to get us halfway there," Liddy said. "Look I'm not the expert, I'm not a Bill Gates either, but I don't think we can afford to compromise. If Australia wants to establish itself as the leading financial centre in this part of the world we can't do that if we're backward in our technology."
McGeoch also took aim at the government's telecommunication policy on access to Telstra's network infrastructure.
"I was on the board of AAPT when we sold it to [Telecom NZ] for $2.3 billion, it's in the books now for just over $400 million. Why? Because the access rate in the government settings in Australia destroyed any other company's opportunity to get a fair go at the Telstra network," he said.
"What we've seen in telecommunications is a very poor set of settings and a very poor administration of policy and the foreign capital just burnt when we could have had a phenomenal breadth of private telecommunications options right across the country," he added. "Where that Opposition [broadband policy] is more troubling is to say 'we're going to leave [Telstra] as a vertically integrated outfit 'cause that's how we sold it to the community'."
"You simply can't get a fair go across their network if they're trying to make a quid off it."
McGeoch and Liddy join others in the industry in condemning the Coalition's broadband policy; however, some analysts have described the policy as being safer to Labor's National Broadband Network.
Last month, internet service provider iiNet announced it had agreed to purchase AAPT's consumer division from Telecom NZ for $60 million.