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The NBN legacy – Rising prices and falling global rankings

Remember when the NBN was going to bring Australia a feast of fast and affordable broadband? Then how is it that Australia is 82rd in the world and falling ever further behind? And how is it that broadband bills keep rising in Australia while falling around the world?

Bob James and I have written many times over more than a decade about the failings the structure and level of NBN pricing. The time seemed right to remind people of why we are in the present situation. See The NBN Legacy_Final

Pricing submarine cable for development

Conference Vanuatu

This is a talk I gave in Vanuatu and again (with some small changes) to the Submarine Networks World conference in Singapore on 8 September 2022.

It discusses how traffic pricing can increase cable utilisation and contrasts the different experiences of PNG and the Solomon Islands nearly two years after the beginning of service on the Coral Sea Cable in February 2020.

Changing business models n Australia and the Cook Islands

This paper is for telecoms operators and regulators who are trying to understand how business models for telecommunications have evolved and what this means for them today. It draws on the author’s forty years of experience in Australia and applies it to the specific case of the Cook Islands.

A close friend of mine made some very flattering remarks about this paper:
It’s the first time I’ve read an article with such a holistic and succinct overview of the evolution of telecommunications and the impact of global digitisation on telecoms operating companies providing transport and delivery infrastructures”. Richard Wiatr is a former senior executive and telecoms engineer who has spent 40 years in the industry.

Some operators are currently looking to regulators to fix the loss of revenues from the move into the digital era. This paper puts the issue into perspective and suggests what they should be doing.

See Changing business models

Who will blink first on NBN pricing?

The showdown on NBN CVC pricing has been a long time coming. The NBN bestowed an extra 40% of CVC capacity to make lockdown due to COVID-19 more bearable. But it is only temporary. The ending of the 40% uplift inserts a decisive event into what was previously a slow boil. At a time when retail margins are becoming exhausted, something has to give.

Co-authored with Bob James and publishedin Comms Day. read it here Who will blink first on NBN pricing

Asset valuation for access pricing

The valuation of assets is probably the most important decision regulators will face for a network business dominated by fixed costs because depreciation and the return to capital derived from this valuation will account for well over half of total costs.

In some recent work for Fiji, there was some debate about whether assets should be based on ‘actual’ or ‘replacement’ costs. As the following report shows, my view is that both theory and practice support the use of replacement costs. Asset valuation-revised-1

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