This appeared last week.
Tuesday, 03 November 2020 11:28
NBN Co behaving much as Telstra did during its monopoly days: Budde
By Sam Varghese
The situation with the national broadband network at the present moment is similar to the time when Telstra was a monopoly and dictated terms to the rest of the market, well-known telecommunications analyst Paul Budde claims.
In a blog post, Budde said the the NBN Co, backed by government money, was flexing its muscles and getting the retail service providers to dance to its tune.
"The NBN Co is a government-backed wholesale monopoly and all the RSPs are at its mercy for access to the national fixed broadband infrastructure," he said.
"A monopoly is, of course, an ideal way to print money as the RSPs have no alternative whatsoever and there is no punishment for mistakes. The country suffered for more than 25 years due to the misuse of the telecommunications monopoly Telstra had for all those years."
Budde said the government was now trying to muscle the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission into changing price regulations and allowing the high costs that the NBN Co had racked up.
"A week later, NBN Co announced that it would stop providing the extra capacity that it had been providing to the RSPs to pass that on to the users during the COVID-19 crisis," he said.
"They will now start turning the broadband tap down. This will result in further deterioration of the service. By doing so, they have tried to force people towards the higher-priced broadband services."
During the coronavirus pandemic, the NBN Co made extra CVC available at no cost to RSPs, due to the increased demand for bandwidth as a result of so many people being forced to work from home.
Budde said the NBN Co's moves had little to do with market-based policies. "If there was competition, the market would set the prices, based on the quality of the service and on what customers are willing to pay. In a monopoly, the RSPs and the users do not have a choice," he pointed out.
Another characteristic of monopolistic behaviour was complexity, Budde said. In other words, everything was made so difficult to understand that nobody could comprehend how the system worked.
"At the height of the Telstra monopoly, it had over 2500 different price plans with different terms and conditions," he said. "On average, something like 20% of plans changed monthly.
"There were only a very few people in the industry who could unravel that complexity and, for them, keeping track of this was a full-time job."
Budde sarcastically commented that it looked as though the people running the NBN Co had got hold of a copy of the handbook used by Telstra during the period when it enjoyed monopoly status.
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My experience with this fact of a monopoly NBN and a panoply of retail service providers is that finger pointing and blame shifting between the RSPs and the NBN is alive and well and means that the customer almost always loses!
The fact that there is no way to
actually communicate with the NBN tech staff is really pathetic. At least you could call Telstra if you has a problem!
In my case the NBN persistently claimed faults were fixed while clearly they were not and when they were apparently fixed the fix lasted just 6-12 hours before it recurred. It's pretty bad when you get the be on first name terms with RSP staff – out of frustration – but can’t communicate that annoyance to the behemoth NBN!
We need a customer responsive NBN before we all go mad!
David.
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