However, critics of this state of affairs get short shrift from Telstra's chief executive officer, Ziggy Switkowski. Switkowski heralded the fifth anniversary of telecommunications deregulation by claiming competition had not been designed with radical changes to market share in mind.
"It was understood that market share is not a proxy for consumer benefit," Switkowski said in a recent address. "Rather, competition was intended to bring lower prices, wider consumer choice, better services and more innovation and investment."
Few can argue that the telecommunications industry has undergone some change over the past five years. However, the bitterness and wrangling over issues such as wholesale pricing, network access and alleged anticompetitive conduct has underscored deep divisions in the sector over the extent to which new players are allowed a share of the spoils.
Unsurprisingly, Switkowski says industry and consumers are benefiting substantially from competition. Telstra's dominance of key sectors make it unlikely to express too much dissatisfaction with the way deregulation has panned out. The company retains a 95 per cent "share" of industry profit and dominates key sectors.
According to figures from the Australian Telecommunications Users Group (ATUG) Telstra continues to hold sway in 85 percent of the local line market, 46 percent of the mobile market, 24 percent of the Internet market and 38 percent of the data market. Figures which beg the question; what is left for 840 other telecommunications providers in the country?
ATUG managing director, Rosemary Sinclair believe figures such as these indicate the need for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to scrutinise the Australian telecommunications marketplace more closely.
"Drawing from a European model, they talk about a company having market power if they hold more than 25 percent of the market," Sinclair says. "Any more than that and there is a clear role for regulatory intervention in order to protect competition."
Sinclair also believes market share figures show that competition is not yet sufficiently robust across the market, access to fixed network services remain slow and opaque, and continued regulation is needed to promote competition.
Sceptics also believe market liberalisation is failing to stimulate innovation, with research and development spending in Australia suffering from tightened budgets and more rigorous cost-benefit requirements. Professor Reg Coutts, a former director of the Adelaide-based Centre for Telecommunications Information Networking (CTIN), is among those who believe the R&D effort is faltering.
"In the old days telecommunications was generally state owned and countries used to compete on the R&D front. We haven't seen the same levels of competition now that R&D is predominantly dependent of the private sector," Coutts says. "As most of the telecommunications companies that operate in Australia are based offshore their R&D is not core to their operations in this country. We have seen Nokia, HP and Nortel all pull back on their R&D in Australia because during this nuclear winter hitting the ITC industry there simply isn't enough money to cover it. Telstra has consistently cut back on its R&D because ultimately it is cheaper for them to buy rather than build."
Nonetheless, few could disagree that prices for telecommunications services have fallen in the years since deregulation. Furthermore the Australian telecommunications sector has been largely immune from the problems experienced by the industry in the European and US market places. We might have caught a cold - but the rest of the world is recovering from a particularly bad bout of pneumonia.
Who's in the market place?
According to the database of services providers held by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO), the early phase of competition saw a rapid expansion of the number of telecommunications service providers, with membership doubling from 1997 to 2001. Much of this expansion was due to the increased prevalence of ISPs, 850 of whom sat in the database in 2001. Although these new data-focussed entrants have proved a volatile sector, overall numbers remained fairly stable until last year, when they fell slightly.
At last count there were 683 Internet Service Providers, 31 voice providers, and 66 combined voice and Internet Service Providers on the TIO lists. While the data sector is the largest in terms of numbers, it is also the sector set for some spectacular growth.
However, diversification of services and service delivery have seen infrastructure providers also play an important role in the telecommunications sector.
While the tug-of-war over Telstra's local loop continues, a multitude of infrastructure providers have been rolling services into CBD, metropolitan, regional and rural areas.
While Gigabyte-Ethernet increasingly challenges copper over the long haul, a range of wireless and satellite options are also coming online, as wholesalers and infrastructure providers such as IP1, XYZed, Uecomm, and NextGen all vie for dominance in an emerging data market.
All we want are cheaper prices for a much better service.
I'm sick of these high prices on phones and internet because the bastards know we need to use them. So what do they do, take advantage of us becuase of the need for phones, suck us into a contract and then punish us for wanting to exit the contract because they changed or screwed the policy on the contract to rip more money from us.
I say, blow the pricks sky high and start all over again.