Australian Telecoms

An unprecedented stoush going on in Australian telecommunications. The result of poor Board and management choices over the years. You don't just wake up and find the telecommunications market has changed. The trends have been evident for years as have the solutions.  Companies like BT have moved faster on broadband, Internet telephony, fixed wireless broadband, wifi and so forth. Even France Telecom proved amazingly responsive after Iliad and others entered the market. They offer video over DSL and got out of cable television wherever they could sell the network (compare that to Telstra). And now claims that they are concerned over the growth of wholesale and the expense of retail.  Its gets dumber and dumber! How can anyone who has looked at Telstra's retail pricing for broadband (i.e. 256 kbps services capped at 200 Megabytes) expect customers to choose them over rivals. You can fool people once and lock them in such that their only option is to shift to a higher priced broadband plan or you can try to offer the market what it wants instead of trying to fight it (based on prejudices developed from flat rate local calls). Telstra needs to take a deep breath and think about how to grow its business rather than trying to fight being regulated. It won't happen in Australia and doesn't happen anywhere else. In the US where regulation has been rolled back somewhat in areas like line sharing there is significant alternative infrastructure competition. If Telstra wants that to be considered it should sell off its cable network asap.