Telstra has accused the Coalition of turning the country's broadband network into an election issue rather than concentrating on how improvements in speed could affect Australians.
Phil Burgess, Telstra's head of public policy and communications, said the Minister for Communications Senator Helen Coonan's broadband focus is "'Labor Party' or 'how much money she's spent' or '[discussion] papers'" rather than the applications that can be enabled.
"[Coonan] should be talking about all the things we could be doing but she doesn't, she talks about Stephen Conroy, and Stephen Conroy talks about those things but he doesn't have the power to do anything," he said today at the Australian Financial Review Broadband Australia conference in Sydney.
The relationship between the telco and the Minister has deteriorated in recent weeks, following Telstra's decision to take Coonan to court and the Minister's refusal to let the telco close its CDMA network without government permission.
Burgess went on to criticise the Minister over the issue of speed, saying the government is causing Australia to lag behind its economic peers in terms of broadband development.
"The Minister once famously said 'What's wrong with 8Mbps?' Most people don't even have 8Mbps, 8Mbps doesn't even begin to do what we need it to do. The applications coming out are bandwidth hungry," he said, citing examples such as videoconferencing.
According to the Telstra exec, the country will need speeds of 10Gbps by the end of the decade and the telco is working on proposals with network speeds of 1Gbps.
Warren Hardy, MD of Optus's consumer operations, said that Burgess's view of Australian broadband is prompted by self interest and a desire to return to its monopoly status. "Listening to Phil Burgess, I was reminded of Chicken Little," he said today.
Hardy added that Australia's broadband infrastructure will be up to the job for some time to come. "Experts say existing copper networks are robust enough to serve our needs for next three to five years," he said.
All the discussions and statements seem to be deliberately ignoring the glaring fact that there are still Australians without any access to broadband at all! These are the small businesses and homes with the dreaded Telstra RIM boxes and "Pair Gain" structures limiting any access - and - they are not "in the country". In many cases they are in those volatile outer-suburban and regional electorates that will swing the next election.
Even from a national security viewpoint - and given Senator Coonan's new "filters for all families" action - just how are dial-up customers, at 35Kbits/sec expected to maintain their virus "signature" files and those critical patches that are - well - standard? The problem is that the PC operating systems and other software now expect you to be broadband connected!!!!
Our lack of real broadband is rapidly becoming a national and family security concern! and OPEL is a long way off, in Internet time! (Even if that helps.)