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Comment by dwd | Hacker News Reader

Shenanigans is an understatement. The government "compensated" Telstra for giving up it's network monopoly and after dropping Labor's plan of fiber to the property for existing connections bought the copper network anyway so Telstra double dipped.

I've already had my NBN connection out for a whole week due to a failure in the copper.

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So previously a private company monopolized the business and now government would monopolize it. I wonder which one is the worse...

The private company one is worse

The private company was privatised after previously being a government run organisaion. They floated it to get a bunch of income, but the nature of large infrastructure is that it's incredibly costly to build a new network. Thus, Telstra simultaneously acted as a private company (trying to deliver returns to shareholders) whilst being this sort of Frankenstein's monster of regulated wholesale monopoly, which hamstrung Australian broadband development something incredible.

What many people don't know as well was that Telstra was subject to a Structural Separation Undertaking which meant that their Operations arm of the business would treat their Retail arm as like a seperate company. Otherwise it would be unfair for competitors.

Except that this was routinely broken meaning the entire telecommunications market was constantly distorted. It really was the worst of all worlds.

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