COMMENTARY--Next time you are bemoaning the painfully slow roll out of broadband services to the Australian market, take some solace from the fact we are not alone. The arrival of broadband technology round the world has turned into a complete farce. In the UK, users and service resellers are lobbying the regulator, Oftel, to force the incumbent telco BT to bring prices of broadband to the levels enjoyed by the Europeans.

Meanwhile, last week in Germany, Deutsche Telekom responded to pressure from the German regulator, RegTP, to increase its DSL prices.

The DSL roll-out in the US is littered with corporate corpses, and Europe is not far different - while in places like Australia and the UK, fewer companies got off the ground in the first place.

The strangest thing of all is that there are still DSL success stories being touted at conferences. Korea and Singapore, are the darlings now. And how strange is that? It looks like these monopoly or near-monopoly players are making a far better job of delivering DSL than the major so-called -competitive" players.

Isn't that exactly the opposite of what we were told would happen?

A few years ago, the telco industry worldwide wave of efforts to turn slow, monopolistic, government-backed PTTs into faster, more efficient, bodies, through the joint tools of privatisation and competition.

At the same time, people started talking about broadband, especially DSL, and the new fast access this technology would allow on the local loop.

It was only natural to expect these two things to work together. A new, more competitive environment would, surely, be one where broadband access would be rolled out quickly to end users. The hot breath of competitors at its heels would drive people like BT into a race to get hold of customer access accounts which might otherwise go elsewhere.

What seems to have happened instead is the reverse. It's like some sort of perverse variation on the -tragedy of the commons". When a company knows it can get all the access accounts, it rolls out enthusiastically. State-owned Korea Telecom had rolled out 3.68 million broadband lines by last December -- almost half south Korea's total telephone lines.

Where a company doesn't own the market, it focuses its efforts on lobbying the regulators to thwart competition. Instead of competition, what we have is regulated not-really-very-competitive markets. For an incumbent, the threat is not the competition, but the regulator. And you deal with regulators by stalling them and sandbagging them, not by delivering products quickly. Play the game well and the regulator can block your competitors more than it blocks you.

I am, of course, ignoring the possibility that any of these companies might be devoted to good customer service. They may provide that incidentally if it is ever provable that there is no other way to make money. In the meantime, the customer is the last person they think of.

Take Deutsche Telekom, while not in the Korea Telekom league, it has delivered around two million DSL lines, more than twice what BT in the UK has done. People I know in Germany are happy with the lines they have -- or at least less miserable than people in the UK. But if you look into the way those lines are provided, you find that DT has 95 percent of the DSL access market in Germany. It's not competition that helped push DSL out there, but lack of it. It's the fact that Deutsche Telekom succeeded in preserving a near monopoly position, and in that position, felt it worth promoting DSL to its ISDN customers.

So, enter RegTP and the European Union. The EU has ordered Germany to force DT to clean up its act on giving other providers access to the local loop. And the regulator has ordered DT to stop subsidising its DSL sales. These measures will have two effects. Firstly DT's DSL prices are going up - they were raised by 30 percent last week. And secondly, since the EU intervention might conceivably mean that exchanges which are opened for DSL may have to be really open, DT will probably start to get more unenthusiastic about actually opening any up (much like BT).

The problems the US faces with the local loop are equally as bad. A wave of dissatisfaction with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was already rising before last year's telecoms bankruptcies. If not for the fact that 11 September shifted everyone's attention away from the problem, new legislation might have been produced last year to addresss that. Still, the Baby Bells which own the local loops of America, may yet face anti-trust cases which could match the one faced by Microsoft.

From the evidence we have, it seems clear that a well-motivated vertically integrated telco, probably government-owned, is likely to deliver DSL quicker than the bucket of hungry snakes which appears to be the alternative.

It comes down to the fact that it costs money to build the infrastructure. With pressure on prices, and take-up uncertain, providers can't find a way to do it -- they can't borrow any more. Railways and roads, in the end, had to be paid for or subsidised centrally, and the same should probably be true for broadband. For a government-owned monopoly telco with good lobbying skills it is easy, but even in a competitive environment it should have been possible for governments to find a way to subsidise fairly, across the board, perhaps through tax breaks. Instead, it looks very much as if most governments either never worked out how to do this, or simply decided not to bother. At the same time as they spouted a lot of -building the information superhighway" rhetoric.

The silver lining is that DSL is good technology. At some point, enough people will have it, enough useful services will be available, and the price will reach a sensible level. Then the mass of people actually want it and it takes off. In the end, the innate value of broadband will draw it out, no matter how greedy and stupid the companies are that are standing in the way -- sorry, planning to deliver it.

In another five years we may look back and see that delay, confusion and frustration in the arrival of broadband was just an unavoidable price we had to pay when we asked for competitive telcos.

Or if it gets any worse, we might all rise up and demand that governments stamp out telco -competition" and restore the cosy, corrupt monopolies we learnt to hate, but now look back on with ill-concealed nostalgia. Is Australia facing the same concerns? Tell us through Talkback

Copyright © 2009 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All Rights Reserved.
ZDNET is a registered service mark of CBS Interactive. ZDNET Logo is a service mark of CBS Interactive.