Labor's new Broadband Minister has officially dismantled the expert taskforce installed by the Howard government to set up its planned fibre-to-the-node network.
In an announcement sent to interested parties on Friday, the expert taskforce said that the development of guidelines around the network has now been stopped.
"The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, has decided that the Expert Taskforce will not be continued. On this basis, and in accordance with section 10.1(i) of the Guidelines for High Speed Broadband Network Infrastructure Proposals, the process has been terminated," the announcement said.
The taskforce, set up in June, attracted almost 50 submissions from local government bodies, industry groups, telcos and other interested parties.
During his time in opposition, Labor's Conroy was critical of the taskforce and promised earlier this year to dismiss the Howard government's panel and replace it with a Labor-picked group "that knows something about telecoms".
Labor is now planning its own open access fibre-to-the-node network, covering 98 percent of the Australian population.
Telstra has already criticised the Labor plan, with CEO Sol Trujillo signalling the telco's reluctance to get involved in a public-private partnership with the government -- reluctance the Minister for Broadband dismissed as "jockeying".
"We will hold an open and transparent process to determine who will build the network with our ambition being to complete the process by the end of June next year," Conroy said. "We expect that there will be much public commentary, jockeying and lobbying from parties as they work to convince the government that they are best placed to build the new network and seek the terms that are most favourable to them."
I'm sure some third world country would welcom Howard's broadband experts with open arms.