Acacia Offers A Fresh Start And Broadband For ALL Australia
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December 1, 2008Interesting to see the reports on Acacia, a Melbourne-based consortium with several former Telstra staffers in its team being a credible candidate for the national broadband network project.
The Consortium
Consortium shareholders include Solomon Lew, Seek founders Paul Bassat, Andrew Bassat and Matthew Rockman, and Australian Broadcasting Corporation director Steven Skala with former Telstra No 2 executive Doug Campbell heading up this group of wealthy businessmen.
The Fresh Start
Doug Campbell maintains Australian broadband users would be best served by having a new network separate from the retail operations of the existing players and Acacia could build the network more cheaply than its rivals as it is free of existing networks and systems. He says Acacia offers ‘a fresh start’.
The Acacia Bid
Interesting points in the bid are:
- a mix of fibre-to-the-home, fibre-to-the-node, wireless and satellite could cover islands such as Christmas, Cocos and Macquarie – closer to Antarctica than Tasmania – contrasting with the 90 per cent promised by Telstra and Optus’ 98 per cent
- unlike Telstra and Optus, Acacia would build the network but would not use it for retail purposes
- Acacia’s partners, such as Fujitsu and Nokia-Siemens, have experience rolling out fibre networks in Australia, Europe and North America
Doug Campbell explains:
“The impetus for the bid was Kevin Rudd’s 20/20 Summit, from which Acacia members came away concerned at the prospect of Telstra gaining the contract to build the national broadband network..
We’d like to see an Australian company that can offer these services as a host-only type of organisation providing a utility-type structure which would give to Australia cheaper, faster, high-speed broadband and a greater choice of retail services by others on that network…
The cost of satellites to service the 2 per cent the Government did not specify had to be covered by the national broadband network would be averaged out over Australia, making it affordable for the 2 per cent.”
What Telstra Says
Telstra chief financial officer John Stanhope doubts the ability of wireless broadband to make up the 8 per cent gap between Telstra’s 90 per cent pledge and the Government’s preference for 98 per cent coverage. He says users would not stand for the variance in quality that characterised wireless.
A new unencumbered organisation and a different approach sounds attractive…
5 Comments
I’ve always been a believer in competitive markets, but for utilities a wholesale-retail model with the competition closer to the consumer than the network.
I believe Acacia has chosen the rational model for Australia, but the trick will be choosing how the products are packaged and presented to the retailers.
I wish Acacia the best of luck and I personally believe they have the most experienced and brilliant telecom manager in Australia in Doug Campbell.
Good to have your comments Tim – would you care to go further with some suggestions on the product development?
I sincerely hope anybody but Telstra gets this contract. Their service is bad, prices higher than anybody else and their monopoly a disgrace. Acacia in my opinion would be the ideal solution.
Like Fred, I hope Telstra and Optus are not even considered. I live on the NSW Central Coast in a semi rural area. A school across the road operates broadband on about 120 computers yet Optus / Telstra tell me I can’t get either broadband or ADSL – only dial up at abiout 1.3 kbps .. one tenth the speed of broadband.
And dial up drops out frequently too .. increasing theiur revenue for a redial !
Friends in a small village in Central Thailand have broadband .. and quite cheap too.
And we dare think we are an advanced country ? Pull the other leg duopoly bandits Telstra and Optus.
I agree with Gail – It took me almost 8 weeks to transfer from IInet to Bigpond – and four months and approximately 15 hours of phone calls to Telstra later I still have not received my ‘welcome bonus’ of $180, or a correct bill. I wish I could charge them for my time and the stress levels they have caused me. I also know I am not alone. If I ran my not for profit that way we would have had our funding withdrawn long ago!