Offshoring
Perhaps Australian labour is too expensive. Telstra opened another new call center in Manilla in April, with an additional 3,500 workers.
Australia's dominant telco, Telstra, will cut 8,000 jobs, flatten its structure by slicing up to four layers of management, turn 1,800 consumer products into 20 (with a similar reduction in the number of enterprise products later), and put its infrastructure into a separate division that could be sold off in the future. …
Wow some time ago under then Prime Minister John Howard Telstra cut 2 x 5000 mainly technical service staff and now it's cutting 8000 jobs, then with many Telstra shops as franchise I doubt many people will be left working for the telco.
Shame they could have years ago refurbished the copper wire.
Labor created the NBN as a monopoly to replace Telstra. Now it appears that Telstra have decided to structurally separate and there is a reasonable chance that either NBNCo will be purchased by InfraCo or the other way around. If Labor had courage this would have occurred in 2008/2009 and potentially the NBN would be in a better state. Potentially NBNCo could purchase InfraCo assets but not the employees, this would deliver significant savings in current payments to Telstra.
It will be interesting to see how Telstra competes going forward. Failures in the mobile network mean it is loosing it's competitive advantage and it will be interesting to see Telstra retain sufficient fibre to compete in the FTTB market.
@ mathew42
Breaking the dominant, former publically owned incumbant into a network company (Infrastructure) and a retail company is exactly what we did in New Zealand.
I don't think the model is perfect, but it seems to be a hell of a lot better than the mess created in Aus.
We have never had the stupid fibre to the premises or fibre to the whatever debate our Aussie cousins have had to put up with. The infrastructure guys were told to run out fibre and given some money to do it.
End of story.
I think you forget the arrogant, combatant, pigheaded, monopolistic beast that was Telstra back when NBN was announced. Do you not remember when Telstra submitted a 1 page response to the original NBN tender? NBNCo was constructed in part to FORCE Telstra to separate into infra and retail businesses because Telstra refused to and was totally happy being the vertically integrated communications monopoly provider.
Well, not just Telstra, but mobile data generally. Most people do not need 100mbs, and mobile data cost is falling daily. 5G will be the nails in the coffin.
Sure, some people will remain on the NBN. Maybe 40%. But that will require a huge asset write down for it to be sold.
There's a lot of copper in the ground, all going back to interconnected central locations. An entrepreneur buying some of it could make a business cheaply interconnecting groups for their own private internets - like hospitals to vendors, insurance companies, and remote databases, all hardwired together with no external connections. I've seen enough evidence that many businesses cannot handle virtual private networks on the public internet without having major security issues, and up untill now, dedicated hardwired connections have been too costly.