I read somewhere that Telstra is doing exactly the opposite in New Zealand, where it is the upstart.

I hope that they waste a lot of dollars on lawyers for this one. Talk about a wanna be monopolist. NO NO NO NO NO.....

Where is the value for consumers in this proposition?

since the infrastructure is a natural monopoly, the solution is auction off the metro areas and large blocks of bush to various companies to run the glass or copper lines under gummint regulation. then the service to consumer companies have a level playing field.

allowing telstra to operate in both ends of the market is madness.

Colin,
Telstra is concerned with its shareholders not consumers. The latter are there to increase the wealth of shareholders.

@al: It is an unusual monopoly that has five extant and independent providers. My street in inner Melbourne has three sets of high-quality cable running down it (1x TP and 2x coax run past my house), not to mention access to two retail wireless IP networks.

In fact, very little of the infrastructure of the telecoms network is a "natural monopoly". Certainly, the inter-exchange network and significant parts of the customer access network could be duplicated to some extent at reasonable cost, and this has in fact been done e.g. by the Optus coax network.

In my opinion, there is one serious problem facing competition in Australia: the high cost, difficulty and very high risk associated with accessing the customer network and Telstra exchanges.

Telstra's advocacy of a HFC/FTTN network is neither utilising a new technology (Telstra is suggesting that 6Mbps HFC links would replace the competition's existing 24Mpbs links!) nor does it require the anti-competitative removal of existing infrastructure; it is merely a way of discouraging competition by increasing risk and uncertainty.

The solution is as simple as the problem: Telstra should be allowed to roll out it's HFC network but it should not be allowed to remove existing infrastructure. The new network should duplicate the existing network, not replace it. This would not cost substantially more than the existing proposal, unless Telstra wants it to. I know this because HFC networks are already common in Victoria.

Of course, Telstra would never willingly do this because they know that their HFC proposal is bankrupt. Telstra is pushing HFC solely because it will cause the removal of existing, adequate & fast infrastructure. But the replacement of the TP CAN with the proposed HFC CAN will actually result in a decrease in average available bandwidth to consumers, if Telstra's own figures are to be believed.

How Telstra gets away with this stuff is beyond me.