Recently, federal communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy has again made some incorrect statements about my proposed improvements to the NBNCo wholesale cost access model.

The comments concerned are reported here:

http://www.zdnet.com.au/hackett-s-nbn-rejig-costs-customers-conroy-339312918.htm

Those reported comments (if accurate) contain a variety of statements about my proposals that are misleading in some cases, and entirely wrong in others.

In an effort to correct the record (again), I will take a look at the statements attributed to Senator Conroy and provide correction and comment about each. (more…)

At the CommsDay Summit in Sydney on 29th March 2011, I delivered a talk describing my analysis of the current NBN Wholesale Pricing Structure.

That analysis showed how the current pricing structure and its environment contains serious challenges such that it will be economically impossible for any National Retail Service Provider to viably sustain being a direct customer of NBNCo if they have less than around 250,000 customers. (more…)

(This is a clearer explanation of the price squeeze, abstracted in part from a longer blog posting from the author here: http://blog.internode.on.net/2010/09/24/price-squeeze-update/)

Those who follow developments in the Australian Internet industry will be aware that many Internet Service providers and their customers are currently suffering the effects of another ‘Telstra Price Squeeze’ in geographic areas of Australia where Telstra holds a monopoly on ADSL broadband services supply.

However, those outside of the Internet service provider industry may be understandably unclear on what this is, what it means, and why it matters.

Where this is mentioned, it can be frequently misunderstood by consumers to mean that providers are just ‘crying poor’ or ‘not trying hard enough’ – that its nothing but an exercise in sour grapes.

It is none of those things.

(more…)